all the broken glass is the same
by black-ostias
Summary: AU in which nothing's changed except daryl isn't merle's brother but his sixteen-year-old son, and in which he and rick fall for each other like a series of strident blows to the head. references: pistengyawa .tumblr .com/tagged/jailbait!daryl
1. prologue

You don't know what it is about him that intrigues you. How he manages to look so young yet so world-weary at the same time? How every muscle in his body screams _stay away_ yet his eyes beg for company, for a friend? How you know that he can hold his own in any fight, yet you still want to protect him and keep him safe? (Among other things. But you don't want to think about that, _can't_ think about it, not without your stomach curling up in both pleasant and unpleasant ways because he's only four years older than your son, for Christ's sake.)

Daryl Dixon is a welter of so many contradicting emotions, and because of him, so are you.

* * *

Something's bound to happen. There's this weight in the air, difficulty in every breath you take the longer you go without Merle. He was your blueprint, the lenses through which you viewed the world, from how you spit at the ground to tossing around racist homophobic slurs, thoughtless as blinking. He was what grounded you, kept your head on straight. _Ain't never gonna survive without me, so don't you say your daddy did jack shit for you._

But your center has shifted now, towards this ragtag group of survivors led by a lawman straight out of your old comic books. You can't quite pin him down yet, it's like trying to find the gray part of a cloud, but you don't mind.

Because something's bound to happen, and you can wait 'til it does.


	2. truth or consequences, and other places

The first time he sees Daryl Dixon, all Rick can think is: that was not what i expected_._

He can't honestly say what he _was_ expecting — maybe a mini-Merle, someone just as obnoxious and nerve-fraying as his supremacist older brother, just as untethered by niceties. But that's not what he gets.

For starters, Daryl's young, so much younger than what Rick had anticipated. And though he doesn't look a day over twenty, the kid wields the crossbow like the weight of it is familiar, a deadly extension of himself. Not quite a man yet, but the framework's already there, set in his broad shoulders and flexing arms, waiting to be filled out.

And he's shockingly pretty. It feels awkward to have to use such a term, but that's the only one Rick can find. Dark blonde hair, fine-boned cheeks, a beauty mark at the edge of his thin lips, scruffy facial hair only barely salvaging his masculinity. The near-cherubic features clash horribly with his harsh drawl, with how he kicks at the walker carcass and sneers at Dale, bristling with youthful arrogance. Rick can't shake the idea that despite the narrowed eyes and the ink peeking out of his shirt, the whole swagger, it's not hostility but uncertainty that's the driving force behind this Daryl kid.

An uncertainty that's only sure to get worse now that his brother's gone.

Rick tamps down the guilt scratching at the walls of his heart, and sets about making things right.

It's Shane who has the burden of broaching the subject to the kid, but Rick ends up stepping forward anyway. He never did like others fighting his battles for him.

"Who're you?" the kid demands, finally taking the newcomer into account.

"Rick Grimes."

"Rick Grimes, you got somethin you wanna tell me?" Daryl's whole body coils tight in anticipation, braced for impact.

In response, Rick forces himself to relax, stay still, reminding himself that wildcats only chase prey that flee.

"Your brother was a danger to us all. So I handcuffed him on a roof, hooked him to a piece of metal. He's still there." The snap of those cuffs echoing with more finality than the shots fired earlier, Merle's grating cocky laughter, then the terror he must have felt when he realized he was being abandoned for the elements to batter him and the walkers to pick him clean if the chain doesn't hold like T-Dog said it would. What supreme power must he have prayed to all through the night, alone and waiting to be spared?

Rick swallows past the lump in his throat. Relax, stay still. Make things right.

The kid's eyes widen, and only then does Rick discover that they're the same shade of gunmetal blue as his brother's. He turns away for a second, swipes furiously at those eyes the way Carl does when he's so upset he cries.

"Lemme process this: you sayin you handcuffed Merle to a roof? And you _left_ him there?" The query ends as a scream, and that's how Rick knows there's no way to diffuse this situation with words alone.

He puts up quite a fight, but the kid's easy enough to take down, even with the knife and the rage. "Chokeholdin's illegal!" he snarls, thrashing about in Shane's grip like a drowned kitten, and Rick marvels at how he's able to sass mouth at a time like this. He crouches in front of the kid in spite of the exertion, the heat. This kid needs to see that Rick's on his side.

"I'd like to have a calm discussion on this topic, you think we can manage that?" Rick repeats this question more determinedly, watches the angry red on the kid's face and his quickening breath, nods to Shane to let him go. Daryl flops to the ground, ready to let out another stream of curses but Rick cuts him to the chase, drops down to his level again. "What I did was not on a whim. Your brother does not work and play well with others."

T-Dog suddenly interjects from the side, "It's not Rick's fault. I had the key, I dropped it."

"Couldn't pick it up?"

"Well, I dropped it in a drain." T-Dog sounds wearily apologetic, grim but determined to redeem himself to this kid, just like Rick.

The kid huffs out an exasperated breath, struggles to his feet. "If that's supposed to make me feel better, it don't."

T-Dog goes on to explain how Merle would be protected from walkers with that padlocked chain around the entrance to the stairwell. Rick watches the kid's face twist up, and tells him firmly, "It's gotta count for something." It has to. Even if he doesn't believe Merle's safe like T-Dog does, it has to.

Daryl rubs away another errant tear, groans, "Hell with all y'all. Just tell me where he is so's I can go get 'im." He doesn't sound livid anymore, just downtrodden and older than he should be, wanting his brother.

"He'll show you," Lori says, cool and quiet as a blade between the ribs. "Isn't that right?"

Rick wonders if he should change his mind while he still can, but one more look at the kid's clenched fists and his teeth sunk into his lower lip convinces him.

"I'm going back."

* * *

The uniform's still a bit damp, but Rick slips it on anyway. It provides familiarity, purpose, the hope that maybe the world can still salvage what's left, that Merle Dixon is still alive and won't try to take Rick's head off once they get him free.

Shane pulls him aside just before they leave. "I don't like this," he sighs, thumbing the four leftover Python rounds into Rick's palm. "Despite what's at stake, the odds ain't too good for you, man. All this for a damn redneck and some guns and a walkie?"

"That redneck has a kid brother he needs taking care of. And you know the rest." Rick clasps the back of Shane's neck, pulls him into a one-armed hug that burns with comforting warmth through his side. "You be careful."

Shane grins ruefully, roughs his hand through Rick's hair. "_You_ be careful. I won't go through nearly losing my buddy again."

* * *

It's a long, awkward journey to what's possibly a suicide mission. There's no radio music to fill the silence because nothing rides the airwaves now. Glenn sighs and drums his fingers on the steering wheel every few minutes, Morse code and distress signals. Rick finally breaks the silence by telling him, "Sorry I got you in trouble twice now."

Glenn smirks, pops off his baseball cap to tousle up his hair. "Long as you keep getting me out in one sentient, non-cannibalistic piece, we're good."

Rick smiles, glances in the rear view mirror to check on the others. T-Dog's clicking the bolt cutters open and closed, scissoring the air. The kid's cleaning his crossbow with a faded red T-shirt, scowling when he comes across the littlest bit of grime. He really does know what he's doing, and cares for it like it's of sentimental value too.

As if he's read Rick's mind, T-Dog prods Daryl's shoe to get his attention, asks, "How'd you get that thing?"

The kid starts, narrows his eyes at T-Dog like he's trying to figure out any ulterior motives. At length he replies brusquely, "My uncle gave it to me when I was nine. Couldn't really use it for a while, though, arms were too short."

Rick can picture it out clearly: a grubby little thing trying and failing to lift a hundred-pound crossbow by his lonesome, and he has to bite back his amusement. Glenn doesn't even bother, just snorting his laughter for a full two seconds before he realizes his mistake and clamps his mouth shut, stares at the road as if it'd crawl by faster if he willed it. But Daryl just frowns like he doesn't know how to react, and sets about checking the bolts.

The overpass looms over them, cutting across the sun and now the metropolis is in sight. Rick decides to try his luck at restarting the conversation. "And your dad? He teach you how to use it and hunt? That was an impressive bunch of squirrels you threw at my head."

He smiles over his shoulder to take the bite out of his words, and the kid blinks, an honest-to-god blush creeping down his face, staining his neck. And just when Rick's given up on hope for an answer, the kid says, "Yeah, he taught me. And if y'all think buttering me up'll make me forget what ya did to Merle, you're dead wrong." But he still looks oddly proud, like he's contradicting his own words.

Glenn finally takes a corner and pulls up to the old train rails just outside the city. The kid turns to T-Dog and glowers at him again. "He better be okay. It's my only word on the matter."

"I told you. The geeks can't get at him. The only thing that's gonna get through that door is us."

Rick wants to say _don't make promises you can't keep_, but keeps himself in check. There's never a time or place for that kind of words.

"Merle first, or guns?" he asks once they slip through the wire fence, and the kid snaps, practically vibrating with barely-leashed energy, "Merle! We ain't even havin this conversation."

"We are." Rick faces Glenn as they start walking. "You know the geography, it's your call."

As it turns out, Merle does take priority, and the kid turns a smug grin on Rick. "Told you." But there are fine lines of tension bracketing the corner of his mouth, the fierce need to see his brother again bleeding through, and for once Rick's glad that he's the one in the wrong.

There are no more walkers flanking the building, so they manage to get in through the fire exit. The department store's empty save for something that was once a young brunette woman, and Rick signals for Daryl to take it down. The kid lopes through the counters and aisles, silent and swift, and shoots the geek in the head after a few choice words for it. It's not that hard to imagine him tagging the deer back at camp for as long as he said he did.

The kid all but kicks the door down once they get the chain off, hollering his brother's name. Rick actually waits for a hoarse curse in reply, but then he sees the severed hand on the ground.

And Daryl starts screaming.

"Dad! _Dad!_"

* * *

Rick's still a bit stunned when Daryl rears around and points his crossbow at T-Dog's face, finger on the trigger. It's by pure instinct that he draws his own weapon, though he can see the kid's more terrified than irate. "Hey," he says softly, reminded of how he had to calm down the stallion that brought him to Atlanta, go slow, go slow. "Don't make me do this, Daryl."

After a long moment the kid relents and looks down, visibly trying not to let the tears that have gathered in his eyes fall. T-Dog breathes out in relief, and Glenn squeaks from behind, "Hang on, Merle's your dad? When you guys first joined us you said –"

"Was his idea, not me." Daryl lets out a shaky exhale, goes over to what's left of his brother – _father_, Rick corrects himself, and it finally hits him, knocks him off his feet because he's just robbed this boy of his father at the expense of getting to his own wife and son, and what does that make him?

Daryl pulls out his rag and kneels to wrap it around Merle's hand. "I guess the, uh. Saw blade was too dull for the handcuffs." There's almost no inflection in his voice at all, though he grimaces at the mess. "Ain't that a bitch."

He stuffs the dismembered appendage in Glenn's pack, but Glenn hardly notices, insisting, "No, wait, why would you lie about something as simple as that? And – how old are you really? You said you were twenty-something, but Merle isn't even fifty so –"

"He had me young," Daryl says in a tone that warrants no further questions, and picks up his crossbow. "Musta used a tourniquet, maybe his belt." He starts following a trail of blood to the opposite stairwell, and Rick can't bring himself to do anything but be led by the kid looking for his father.

* * *

The lower level of the building must've been a bustling office of sorts, but now it's deserted, papers scattered all over the floor alongside two walkers bludgeoned in the head by a wrench. Daryl chuckles and restrings his bow. "Took 'em out one-handed. Toughest asshole I ever met, Merle. Feed him a hammer, he'd crap out nails."

"You can call him dad now, you know, the secret's out anyways," Rick tells him, and the kid just stares at him like he's been insulted in Farsi.

"That guy was never my dad. But he's kin."

Rick begs to differ, judging by what happened earlier on the rooftop, but then remembers the man he first met using walkers as target practice as if he had ammo and safety to spare, can't recall ever thinking for even a second that that man might have a single fatherly bone in his body, and thinks Daryl's right. Instead he says, "Any man can pass out from blood loss, no matter how tough he is."

There's nothing on this floor, but the next one presents them with a gas stove still burning, Merle's belt, and an iron with burned skin stuck to it. Daryl takes it in stride, better than Glenn at any rate, sounding smug as hell as he goes, "Told you he's tough. Nobody can kill Merle but Merle."

Rick sets the iron down, glad to be rid of it. "Don't take that on faith. He's lost a lot of blood."

But Daryl paces to the nearby window, and snorts in triumph, "Yeah? Didn't stop him from busting outta this death trap."

The glass has been broken, a bloody piece of cloth on the ledge the only thing confirming that these two incidents weren't separate. "He left the building?" Glenn hisses. "Why the hell would he do that?"

Rick pokes his head through the window, and there's the metal ramp leading out into an alley. "Why wouldn't he?" Daryl's back to his confident self, unmovable from his faith in his father's hardiness. "He's out there alone as far as he knows, doing what he's gotta do. Survivin."

"You call that surviving?" T-Dog demands as Daryl checks around a bit more. "Just wandering out in the streets, maybe passing out? What are his odds out there?"

"No worse than being handcuffed and left to rot by you sorry pricks," the kid snaps, and turns his razor-sharp eyes on Rick, accusing. "You couldn't kill him. Ain't so worried about some dumb dead bastard."

He's in pretty close proximity, Rick realizes a bit late, the ugly scrawl of the kid's mouth testing his already frayed patience. "What about a thousand dumb dead bastards? Different story?" he asks, trying to get him to see sense.

Daryl's lip curls up like smoke, an impatient sneer. "You take a tally, do what you want. I'ma go get him." He moves forward like he'll actually follow his father through the window, and Rick has to push him back by the chest.

"Daryl, wait –"

"Get your hands off me!" he spits, jolting back like he's been struck. From behind him Rick can see Glenn curse noiselessly from how shrill Daryl's complaints are, the noise rebounding. "You can't stop me."

"I don't blame you." Rick's the one to step into Daryl's space now. He can see exactly which lines will be carved into the kid's face if he survives to middle age. "He's family, I get that. I went through hell to find mine. I know exactly how you feel."

Daryl tightens his jaw, more than ready to say _fuck you_, Rick can see it pressing its snarling shape against his mouth, but he doesn't, swallows it back. So Rick continues, "He can't get far with that injury. We could help you check a few blocks around but only if we keep a level head."

There's a beat, Daryl sucking in his lower lip as he thinks about it, then: "I could do that."

The amorphous worry in Rick's stomach settles, dissipates almost completely. Merle Dixon may not work and play well with others, but it looks like his son does.


	3. things out there that'll bend your bones

The rhythm of Daryl's task gets to him, hearing his uncle Jess saying, _swing and hit, sonny, just swing and hit_, though that had been for lumberjacking and not splitting open human skulls. This geek's face is nearly rotted off and it's not a hardship to heft the pickaxe over his head, unlike when he had to do it to Michelle, or Bo, and the others he used to pass by every day. The wooden handle slips through his sweat-slick palms, but he drives it home easy. Daryl leaves the now proper corpse for T-Dog and Glenn to toss into the fire, breathing hard through his mouth because he can get used to all kinds of foul things but never the smell of burning fresh, too much like what Merle left sizzling on an iron for him to see.

Jacqui and Jim are staring, he can feel the dig of it at his back, and when he glances at them they're slow to pretend they weren't. The city folk occupied themselves with small talk as they worked through the night, and from Glenn (can't be anyone but) to Morales to Jacqui to whoever else, they all now know by word of mouth that Merle's Daryl's father, not brother. It's a small blessing, the fact that their sympathy wasn't directed at him for long, not when they were waist-deep in too many other people's graves. Daryl's arms still feel rubbery and there's a deep ache making itself known between his shoulder blades from thrusting a shovel into the unforgiving ground.

Out of the corner of his eye Daryl can see Rick Grimes trudging up the hill, back from radioing whoever the hell it is on the other end. Daryl thinks about taking fists to that self-pitying face until his knuckles are stained fresh red, until he can see Rick's teeth through his cheek. None of this would have happened if he hadn't turned rescuing Merle into a goddamn crusade, if he hadn't brought so many others along, if he'd let Daryl just take the Bonnie and go by himself, he knows he's always faster and better alone—

And then he takes another look at Rick and realizes that neither hell nor high water could stop the guy from righting a wrong.

Whether Rick's afflicted with a messiah complex or plain stupidity, Daryl can't figure out yet. He hasn't met many morally upright men in his life, and now that he has, he's hard-pressed to say if such a quality is an advantage or a liability.

Daryl stands and observes Rick advance on Andrea to talk some sense into her, and barely represses a snort when he sees the telltale glint of metal and hears the snick of a safety being turned off.

A liability, then, he decides as Rick retreats with his tail between his legs. That won't happen to him.

* * *

"Y'all can't be serious," Daryl tells Rick as a pulse of anger throbs through him, incredulous and overpowering. Don't have the balls to risk hurting someone's feelings even when lives are at stake. Asshole should've thought of that when he handcuffed Daryl's father to a roof.

"Y'let that girl hamstring us? The dead girl's" – Amy, lovely Amy who'd flirted harmlessly with him and ignored Merle's crass questions about her being jailbait, Amy who once seriously asked if he could use his crossbow to catch fish and now will never find out if that's possible – "a time bomb."

"What do you suggest?" Rick asks shortly, pinching the bridge of his nose raw.

Daryl steps closer to get his point across. "Take the shot. Clean in the brain, from here. Hell, I can hit a turkey between the eyes from this distance."

"No. Let her be."

Lori, hushed firm voice skittering across the back of Daryl's neck, and he watches Rick and Shane trade exasperated looks, their silence speaking for itself.

Daryl can feel his knuckles grow white from where he's gripping his pickaxe, because this shouldn't be left alone, it should be dealt with, like how he dealt with his uncle staggering to his feet again only to try and rip him apart, and sinking his knife into Jess's temple was the worst feeling in the world, and Andrea shouldn't have to go through that.

But the sun's coming up, hotter out here by the minute, and Daryl has better things to do than pick a fight he'll just lose. He scoffs and goes over to the pile at the other end of camp.

Jim's staring ahead, one hand fisted in his jacket pocket, but it's not like the man doesn't do that, get lost in his own head. "Wake up, Jimbo, we got some work to do," Daryl reminds him, sets his pickaxe down to help Morales drag Eli, or what remains of Eli, to the bonfire.

"Whoa, hey, whoa, what are you guys doing?" Glenn exclaims from behind them, and Daryl ignores it, keeps going but Glenn's nothing if not persistent. "This is for geeks. Our people go in that row over there."

"What's the difference?" Daryl snaps. "They're all infected." He has to set the body down for a breather, and Morales follows.

Glenn cries out, pure hysteria trickling in, "We don't burn them! We bury them." His dark eyes gleaming with unshed tears, and Daryl wants to cut him, tell him to shove his sentiment where it don't shine but. He remembers how terrified the guy was yesterday, screaming Daryl's name as he got manhandled into a car, now with almost all his friends gone, and he lets it lie. He just can't resist launching the grenade from a safe enough distance. "Y'reap what you sow."

Morales says, all bitchy and tired, "You know what, shut up, kid," but Daryl isn't having it.

"Y'all left my father for dead!" he snarls, and it's the first time he's admitted this to the whole group of his own volition, and he savagely hopes that guilt builds like chalk dust at the backs of their throats. "You had this coming!"

And then it turns out Jim's been bit, and Daryl gets the barrel of a gun aimed at his temple for trying to put the man out of his misery. This day just keeps getting better and better.

* * *

As Rick hauls Jim to the safety of the RV, Daryl's made up his mind. He's already loaded Merle's Bonnie into the back of his pickup when Shane comes up to him, pickaxe threaded through his arms from where it rests on his shoulders.

"Whoa, where the hell do you think you're going?" There's an almost laughing tone in the man's voice, and the utter condescension makes Daryl clench his teeth so tight he can hear the enamel screech in protest.

He chucks his knapsack into the back a little harder than necessary. "Finding Merle."

The mirth drops off Shane's face so fast, invisible hooks yanking downwards. "Kid, do you even have the faintest idea as to where he'd go? Or if he isn't dead in a ditch from blood loss, dehydration, a walker attack? Are you really that stupid as to beat those kinda odds?"

The insult to his intelligence hits Daryl in the face like a slap, and he balls his hands into fists, spits back, "Y'all are the stupid ones! Trustin us and layin out a fuckin welcome mat and a spot in this camp when we was gonna rob ya blind?"

And it's true, too. Merle had certainly laid it on thick to get the menfolk's guard down, spinning a sob story about how desperately he needed to take care of his little brother. (Come to think of it, it must've been all the weed Merle was smoking that day that led to the weird cover-up and the onslaught of charm.) The ladies had taken one look at Daryl and cajoled the rest of them into letting the Dixons stay.

So Merle had joined the run to the city to leave the others behind, thin out the defending forces, and look how magnificently _that_ backfired.

Daryl knows he should never have brought this up. Shane's face is pretty much worth it, though. "You son of a bitch, c'mere!" He grabs Daryl by the back of his neck as if he's a naughty mongrel pup that needs disciplining, yanking him unceremoniously to the RV. Daryl tries to kick and claw his way free, but Shane's already hollering for Rick.

Rick emerges, already reaching for his holstered gun by instinct, and Daryl huffs. This threatening him with bullets tactic is getting old fast.

"What is it, what –"

"Him and his good old dad, the one you risked your neck for? They were gonna rob this camp, and now that he's lost his partner in crime he's hightailing it out of here." Shane doesn't even bother masking his razorblade scorn, his hold relentless, and Daryl growls, manages to twist away. Rick turns to Daryl, his eyes wide with shock for a moment, then carefully shuttered, impassive.

"...is that true?"

Daryl resists the urge to shuffle in place. Rick's benevolent air never fails to unnerve in a disturbing, effective way. He's already dug his hole, he might as well make it a little deeper, and he smirks at the unfortunate choice of metaphor. "Yeah. So o'course you won't want me around now, huh."

Shane grows livid, hissing, "Not before we bend a few bones on you, motherfucker –"

"Let it go, Shane." Rick turns his gaze on Daryl again, not missing a beat. "You were gonna. But it didn't work and now here we are. Either we give you enough supplies and let you go on a wild goose chase for your father, or you stay and do your part. We're spread thin enough as it is. I'd really not have your blood on my hands either way. So which is it?"

He sounds so matter-of-fact about it, and Daryl marvels. Strange creaking feeling in his ribcage, and no one's ever given him the time of day quite like this, let him have a say in his fate. His voice, when he finds it, is normal enough, though. "M'better on my own." He stumbles over a kind of huffing laugh. "But I'm stayin. Ain't got enough gas for a long run anyway."

Rick pauses, the hint of a smile crimping the corner of his lips, and nods once. "I'll hold you to that." Then he's striding away, motioning for T-Dog to help him create more holes, because apparently all the existing ones _still_aren't enough.

Daryl blinks after him, made sluggish by the sun, and suddenly Shane's up in his face, an ugly sneer twisting his mouth like barbed wire.

"Now listen here. Rick may trust you but only because he wasn't around to see the shit you always sling around. You daddy ain't here to protect you no more. You try anything remotely fishy, I shoot you. Understand?" He smiles without waiting for an answer, saccharine-sweet. "Alright. You still got work to do."

His pickaxe is shoved roughly into his hands again, and Daryl swiftly gets pissed off. "Look at you. Tryna salvage what's left of your ego now that Rick's gone and stole your leader role. Stole his girl and kid back too, and ain't that sad."

If the muscle jumping in Shane's jaw is anything to go by, Daryl's hit exactly the right nerve, and he wants to cackle madly when all the guy can fire back is "Fuck you."

Daryl turns heel, throws a careless "You wish, asshole" to the wind and doesn't bother looking back.

* * *

Ed Peletier's carcass is as unglamorous as his living meatsuit, a skin he took off whenever he raised a hand to his wife, one that he now will never wear again. Daryl's gladly ready to drive the pickaxe into his head at least twice for good measure but then:

"I'll do it. He's my husband."

For a moment Daryl wants to say no: Carol's face is the most pathetic of all of them, small thin face smudged with dirt, tear tracks running through them like rivers on a desolate landscape. Then he thinks about how every bruise he ever glimpsed on her might have been meant for her daughter, and he hands it to her, steps back.

He doesn't know if he should leave, or say something, so he does neither, just watches Carol's twig fingers wrap around the handle and destroy her husband, and he wonders if his mother would have protected him with the same vigilance from Merle's callous neglect.

He also wonders when the hell he can get a motherfucking cigarette again.

* * *

Amy and the rest are buried without much fanfare. Daryl takes care of his father's hand alone, in a secluded spot away from it all. Morales and his family head in the opposite direction, to Birmingham. And further down the road to the CDC Jim is placed gently in the arms of the forest to rest, or not rest. It's more familiar faces wiped out just like that, the comfort they brought with their steady presence gone, and Daryl's chest feels carved out, shredded as good as any walker could do.

"You're a good kid," Jim tells him, his face very white, eyes shining brighter than torches, and there's an unexpected lump in Daryl's throat, so all he can do is nod curtly and walk away. He pretends not to feel Jim tracking his every step back to his pickup.

* * *

Smash-cut to five hours later, and Daryl holds off taking a shower for snagging the office at the very beginning of the hall, easy way out, and away from everyone, finally. It used to belong to some big shot, judging by the trophies and certificates lined up on the bookcases. There's only one personal item in the sea of credentials, a photo of a Hispanic-looking family with two little girls at a petting zoo. He doesn't dwell on where they could be now.

Neither does he dwell on how strange the sight of a drunken Rick Grimes is.

Daryl all but barrels into the man when he steps out to take that shower, and Rick actually staggers back a step or two, mumbling _whoa_ and grinning like a loon. Daryl raises an eyebrow at the already halfway empty bottle of red in his clumsy grip.

"C'mon, don't tell me you're gon' finish that all by yourself." He's only in the moderately buzzed stage and would like to hit the pass-out-without-a-hitch stage soon. But instead of just handing the bottle over like the gentleman he's supposed to be, Rick gets other ideas. He comes close enough that Daryl can smell the generic soap, see how soft his newly-dried hair is. Rick tips the neck close to Daryl's mouth, and through some odd second-degree coordination Daryl gets to take a few long pulls from the bottle, his throat clicking painfully as he swallows. Rick looks poleaxed, staring back at him with this unfamiliar intensity that makes Daryl skittish.

He breaks off with a gasp, pats Rick's arm quickly with an "A'ight, hog it all to y'damn self" and scampers to the showers.

From one of the rooms he passes by Daryl can hear Andrea say "it's over, there's nothing left."

The water's approximately a hundred degrees but that's not enough, he needs lye and steel wool to scrape Andrea's words and Rick's heavy gaze away.

* * *

When Daryl gets back to his room Glenn is dozing off on the couch, and Daryl really doesn't want to deal with this.

"Hey, get up," he barks, kicking at the vicinity of Glenn's red sneakers, the laces still undone. "Get your own room, for Christ's sake."

"Daryl," and he's mortified when Glenn drags his name out so much it sounds like a moan, "_you_ get your own room."

Daryl sits by him and pulls at him until he's partly sitting up, stabs his chest with a finger. "Fuck you, I was here first."

Glenn's head just flops against Daryl's shoulder like a beached whale, hair damp against his skin, blinking blearily up at him. His cheeks are still a little ruddy, and Daryl recalls his little challenge from earlier, smirks. "Goddamn lightweight. Outta my room."

And Glenn sways forward, kisses him like it's the next logical step. It's off-line, badly angled, shockingly warm and tender.

Not to mention Daryl's first kiss ever, and holy shit this is not how he imagined it would go.

He jerks back but then Glenn heaves himself half onto Daryl's lap, legs over Daryl's knees. Glenn pushes and makes little jabs into Daryl's mouth with his tongue, kind of all over the place, and his hands are screwed in Daryl's shirt, so Daryl can feel his knuckles on his chest and stomach.

It's actually weirdly nice up until Glenn starts mumbling in between kisses, "you're so hot so really pretty oh man daryl." And he abruptly remembers that this is Glenn, this is a _guy_, and he feels like he's walked around a corner smoking a jay and stepped straight into a police station.

Daryl can't get out of there fast enough.

He trips into the first empty office he finds, locks the door while working his fly open. Every breath feels punched out of him, and his mind keeps looping on the feel of Glenn against him deceptively small, soft.

He pushes that stuff away, righteously angry now, because Glenn wants to be gay, fine, whatfuckingever, but he doesn't get to be gay with his tongue down Daryl's throat. Thankfully, Daryl gets a hand on himself and it's girls, curved and sculpted and shiny-lipped, almost all girls save for Glenn flashing randomly past, and Daryl thinks absurdly, i've been infected, this isn't my fault.

Daryl doesn't want to think about Glenn. He's leaning hard against the door, his hand working fast inside his shorts, and he mouths messily across his forearm braced against the wood, wet bite searing on his skin. He's not thinking about Glenn.

He's thinking about Rick instead.

And Daryl thinks, _no_, and then, _no no_ _no_, because Rick Grimes is a man, a married man, this can't be happening, he's not that fucked up yet.

But Rick's hands are hard and rough, almost too rough scratching down Daryl's stomach, sliding under his belt. He's licking inside Daryl's mouth, down his throat and across his collarbone. Daryl's gasping, terrified, his grip incredibly slick and hot and his hips jerking forward. Images crash together in his mind, Rick Grimes on his knees sucking a bruise at the edge of his hip, smiling up at him and twisting his hand just like this, so tight Daryl feels like he's dying. Then he's coming hard, teeth sunk into his lower lip to keep from crying out, finishing on a series of staggered moans.

Daryl slumps, his head rolling on the door, and he can feel his heartbeat in his temples, the place where his wrist is pinned against the doorjamb. The endorphin rush rages against panicked adrenaline and Daryl thinks he might throw up.

"No," he mutters to himself, and wipes his mess on the carpeted floor. His hands are trembling and stupid. "Ain't like that."

There's a floor-length mirror on the wall to his right. "That wasn't your fault," Daryl tells his reflection. A scared-looking kid blinks back at him, lower lip gnawed to hell and the color gone from his face. Not liking the sight of it, Daryl narrows his eyes, hardens his jaw, scowls with true determination.

"You ain't like that," Daryl says, a little louder, and it echoes slightly. He sounds pretty convinced.

* * *

Daryl comes to breakfast late on purpose, hoping to be the only person left. But everyone's still at the table thanks to their late night, T-Dog in his element, dancing around gleefully and prodding eggs into plates. Daryl's eyes are riveted to the nape of Rick's neck, where his hair's starting to curl up as it grows longer, and then to Glenn with his head in his hands, groaning about how he can barely even remember anything about what happened yesterday.

It's both the best and the worst thing that Daryl could have possibly hoped for.

After Jenner's livening home movie Daryl grabs an untouched bottle of whiskey (finally, some good stuff) and passes by his old room space to get his things, and finds Glenn already placing them neatly by the door. "Hey, man. Sorry I stole your room," he tells Daryl, sheepish and blurry-eyed and vaguely apologetic, but not for reasons he doesn't even know.

_Definitely better this way_, Daryl thinks, taking another shot of whiskey and not dwelling at all on the shade of Rick's eyes as his son teases him about being hungover, spun silver with warmth.

And then the power goes out.


	4. his hands do not go to the moon

Rick wakes up and for a second he's certain that they're still at the CDC, hard flat surface underneath him and his wife's body tucked safely against his. The fringe of trees above them sets him right, though, a hot tight feeling growing in his chest as he remembers what occurred just yesterday. His whole face aches, his eyes and jaw and the nape of his neck. Lori murmurs and rolls onto her back as he sits up, looking like she hasn't slept well either, and not because they spent the night in the back of a pickup.

Breakfast is canned peas, tacky and sticking to Rick's throat. Carl keeps nodding on and off beside him, a spoon clinging stubbornly to his loose fingers. A hundred and twenty-five miles before them, and already Rick feels the distance like it itches everywhere but he can't scratch. Sitting farthest from where everyone's huddled together to combat the early morning chill is Daryl, propped against his father's bike and swiping his fingers through his bowl. He's wrapped in something that looks more like an old horse blanket than an actual poncho, and Rick tries to imagine if the kid has ever owned anything in his life that wasn't secondhand, aside from his precious crossbow.

The walkie-talkie still doesn't pick up a signal, even all the way up on the roof of an apartment, nothing but white noise hissing viciously at him. Rick wonders if winging it into the brick wall behind him will make him feel any better, and he decides it won't. His sheriff's uniform, his hat, his skin, none of it seems to fit him anymore. Lori doesn't press the issue when he tucks the offending garments back into his bag, only kisses him feather-light on the cheek, and it gives him the strength he needs.

"We're headed for Fort Benning," Rick tells the group, and Shane is wearing a mild smirk, as if it's taking everything in his power not to say _i told you so_ with all the smugness he deserves. It's not a mean smirk, though, just teasing, and even reassuring in its odd Shane-like way. Rick's tempted to stick his tongue out at him, made childish again. "How are we on fuel?"

Dale tugs his fishing hat onto his grizzled head. "The RV's pretty loaded, so you're welcome to take gas for your vehicles, but only so much."

"It'd be best if we maximize space," Shane supplies. "I'm willing to leave my jeep behind, ride with you, maybe, Dale?"

Rick thinks that there's a stiffness to Dale's smile as he agrees to that, but maybe it's just the old man squinting against the glare of the sun. T-Dog places the keys to his car in Rick's palm, gallantly hushing any further protests.

"I'll just join Andrea and Glenn in the RV," he says, his endearing gap-toothed smile showing Rick that there are no hard feelings. "You guys can take Carol and Her Majesty Sophia with you." He bows low to the little girl, and she grins into her oversized sweater, one of her few proper smiles Rick's seen in all the time they've been together.

"M'takin the chopper."

The first words Daryl has spoken all morning, and already Shane is shaking his head no. "That'll make too much noise," he insists, and Rick can't help but agree.

Daryl shoots Shane a staggeringly unimpressed look. "S'the point. If we ever come across a group of those things, I can draw 'em away."

Rick glances back at him in surprise, because for someone used to survival the kid's showing a remarkable lack of self-preservation now. Dale voices Rick's thoughts, asking, "Are you willing to risk that?"

The corners of Daryl's mouth quirk up as if he's just as amused by the idea. "Better me than you, old man."

T-Dog and Glenn start siphoning fuel from the vehicles to be left behind, and Rick finds his feet carrying him to where Daryl is pulling his poncho over his head, flashing a piece of his stomach and Rick gets weirdly stuck on that. The spell broken only by the kid saying brusquely, "Help you with somethin?" and the skinny slit of his eyes are curious and wary, but not hostile. Not yet.

Rick can only hope Daryl doesn't work out exactly what happened the night before last, standing toe to toe and sharing a bottle of wine, thoughtless as breathing. This dream-memory of the flex of Daryl's throat, the sideways cut of his gaze, it's for Rick alone to bury deep, if he ever even succeeds doing that at all.

He coughs a bit, says, "I never thanked you for letting us sleep in your pickup."

Daryl shifts minutely, just the idea of a shrug. "Weren't nothin," he mumbles, stuffing his poncho into his pack and slipping on a worn leather vest with white wings bursting at the shoulder blades, another hand-me-down. "That all?"

"Are you sure about what you're volunteering to do?" Rick asks, and maybe there's a crack of color, blue and white, a flare of interest on Daryl's face for a split second, but there's no real way to confirm it.

"I can double back, long as y'all stay on the highway."

So matter of fact and reckless, and Rick sighs, wondering when exactly that combination became a foreign concept to him. "You don't have to do that. Risk your life."

Daryl studies him for a long moment, nothing in his expression, looking like a photograph in a magazine, empty like that. Then he says, "Just don't leave me t'rot."

Rick doesn't think twice about his answer. "I won't let that happen."

There's a beat, Daryl holding completely still as twin spots of color rise on his cheeks. He nods fast, turns away and swings onto his bike, kickstarts the engine and how something with such a small gas tank makes such a racket Rick will never know. He feels breathless, overheated, not sure what's wrong with his body today.

But before Rick can decode the raveling sensation in his insides, T-Dog taps him on the arm, tells him that they're ready to go, and Lori's mouth is sweet on his and he doesn't dwell on anything else.

* * *

Shane's found a delivery van filled with water gallons, and he wastes no time tearing one open and dousing himself until he's sopping wet, his high ecstatic laughter mingling with Glenn's, and maybe they've finally caught a break.

Rick is a fucking idiot for letting his hopes get that high.

It's such a huge group of undead that swarms them, maybe not as many as all those wretches in Atlanta but the fact that they're in open space, moving together as if with a purpose — it shakes Rick in brand new, cliff-edge terrifying ways.

_Like a herd_, he muses hysterically. _Sheep come to the pasture to feed._

So Rick can't blame Sophia for losing her way in the woods. But as Shane nods at him and he leaves with Glenn in tow, Rick realizes a second too late that he didn't really think any of this through.

Daryl doesn't bother meeting his eyes, just motions for him to follow and Rick does that, his Python at the ready though he knows it won't be much use. For all his crass behavior, when he wants to Daryl barely makes a sound, his biceps strung tight from the intensity of his focus, weaving his way through the grove with enough finesse that Rick becomes too aware of his own blundering footsteps, the heaviness in his limbs.

After a while, when it looks like things are going nowhere, he decides to break the silence. "Tracks are gone."

Daryl bends forward a little, squints like he's reading words off a page. "Naw. They're faint, but they ain't gone. She came through here."

"How can you tell?" Rick asks, genuinely curious. "I don't see anything. Dirt, grass –"

"You want a lesson in tracking or find that girl and get our ass off that interstate?" Daryl counters, not quite a growl but building up to that, and Rick doesn't press him, even though he hates the quiet looming over them like a bad angel.

They come across a walker in the steeper part of the woods, and through this low-level understanding of each other Rick distracts it as Daryl puts a bolt through its eye. It's easy to fall back in the routine of detective work, searching the suspect for clues, though he's never had to rip one open before. Daryl stops him before he actually gets to that. "I'll do it," he says, drawing a knife from his belt that's a lot bigger than Rick's meager jackknife. "How many kills you skin and gut in your life, anyway?"

It's supposed to be deriding but Rick feels it as more of a teasing jab, and he opens his mouth to answer but then there's a sickening _thunk_ and a freshly rotting stench that flays Rick's senses open. It takes everything in him to prevent his breakfast from crawling back up his throat, seeing as Daryl's completely unfazed by the whole ordeal, going to bury the knife in the walker's distended gut again. He keeps glancing at Rick too, a wry grin on his face, like watching Rick's contorted expressions of disgust is the most entertainment he's had in a while. His hair's darkened by sweat and dirt, almost a different color without sunlight streaming through, and Rick wants to push it into even more haphazard shapes, maybe tug a little.

"Now's the bad part," Daryl huffs, and Rick's startled out of his back alley dark room thoughts. Daryl starts sifting through blackened innards, tossing what probably used to be a liver to the side, and Rick can't help the low groan that escapes him when some intestines get torn in the removal process. Daryl doesn't even flinch, leaning closer and sinking his hands past the wrist into the carcass. "Yeah. Hoss had a big meal not long ago. I feel it in there." He scoops the stomach out, drops it on the ground and this time Rick insists on doing the job. His mind churns with all the possible ideas as to what they'll find, sticking on the worst: bits of a blue T-shirt, soft chunks of flesh, maybe tufts of blonde hair like Daryl's. But there are only the remnants of a woodchuck, and still no Sophia.

He sighs, pulls off his ruined gloves. "At least we know."

"At least we know," Daryl echoes, but when they march back his sweat-shined shoulders are curved forward, a perpetual question mark, still asking for a little girl even though all his efforts look to be a waste.

* * *

Lori finds Rick hunched on the roof of an old station wagon, rifle at the ready. She's trussed up in a ghastly orange blanket, and he has to smile when she thwaps him on the arm to get him to scoot over, wraps the blanket around him too. In her hands is a steaming bowl of something Rick's nose is too numbed by the cold to try and figure out.

"You pick the worst times to close yourself off," Lori grouses, but with a smile to take the bite out of her words. Her head fits perfectly in the dip of Rick's neck and it gives him a little peace.

He drops a kiss into her hair as he says, "There is literally nothing for me to say this time, I think."

"Then let me say it for you." She straightens again, touches Rick's jaw and her fingers are warmed from holding the bowl, her eyes deathly serious. "You blame yourself because that's the irrational, big-hearted man I know and love. You blame yourself even though when Sophia bolted you went after her without a thought, like she was your own. Everyone saw that, and what Carol said? Was just grief talking. She's worried sick but tomorrow we're finding Sophia, and you can stop beating yourself up about it and eat your damn peas."

It feels good to laugh and so Rick does, setting down his rifle after one last look through the scope. "I'm beginning to loathe these peas," he tells Lori, but licks his bowl clean anyway. Lori makes a face, complains that he's taking after that redneck Daryl, yelps when he tries to slobber over her cheek. They're both giggling like they're back in high school after a brief tussle, and Rick feels guilty again, though not for the same reasons as before.

* * *

Rick screams for Sophia with his whole body, not caring that his voice box now feels like it's been doused in burning oil, and still the church is a dead end. But he and Glenn drag the walker corpses out, let Carol pray in peace, every word falling from her lips twisting the spiked barb dug under his ribcage. Carl is small and scared by his side, and Rick draws him close, tells him:

"We'll find Sophia soon."

The lie is sandpaper in his already parched mouth.

"Gotta move here, man," Shane says, the setting sun painting the side of his face gold. "These people are spent. There's only so many hours of daylight left, we still got a long way back."

Rick knows all this, as drugged with exhaustion as the rest of them, the same powerlessness. But. "I can't stop yet."

Shane starts talking faster, obviously trying to keep his temper in check. "We still got a lotta ground to cover, whole other side of the creek bed, so we search that on the way back."

"She would have heard those church bells. She could be nearby."

"She could be a lot of things."

There's glass underneath Rick's eyelids, the sting of Shane's implication. He can't consider that even for a moment, not anymore. "I can't go back. Her being out here is my fault," he says aloud.

Shane snorts, soft burst of frustrated sound. "That's great. Now they got you doubting yourself, huh?"

Shane's angry with him, the kind of angry that arose whenever he thought Rick was being marvelously stupid, and it's understandable. The query still comes unbidden, though.

"What about you, you doubt me?"

He never does get around to answering, but how Shane smacks him on the shoulder and how "me and Rick" rolls off his tongue so instinctively when he tells the group his plan, that's answer enough for Rick.

* * *

Rick pours his heart out to a supreme being for the first time since he was eight years old and fidgeting in his well-pressed Sunday's best, and it still feels the same: like he's crazy, begging someone who isn't there for a sign that things would be okay. But then the buck steps into the glade, its huge liquid eyes staring calmly after Carl's slow approach. Rick and Shane exchange wide grins, and all is right in the world.

And then Carl collapses almost at the same time the buck does, with an explosion of noise then a quiet thud, and Rick is screaming because his boy's precious blood is turning his clothes black, Rick's hands are slick with it, he can't make it stop. Shane is a rabid dog, howling, "Who the _fuck_ is shooting, fucking show yourself," brandishing his shotgun and a man materializes from the trees, rotund and white-faced as he stammers, "Please don't shoot me, it was an accident, I sw-swear."

Rick's drawing his pistol without a second thought, shoving the man against the tree, drowning out Shane's yells, the man's blubbering excuses. "Do you realize what you've done?" he cries out, the barrel of his Python snug against the man's cheek, he's yelling, "I'll kill you, I'll fucking _kill_ you, do you realize what you've done –"

"Rick." The desperate crack in Shane's voice finally grabs him, and Rick turns around to see Shane kneeling over Carl, gasping, "He's still breathing, he's still alive, he's alive, brother," and Rick drops the shooter, presses his ear to Carl's chest and there it is, a glorious heartbeat, and Rick only realizes he's crying when his vision goes blurry with tears. He makes a pained noise, an inchoate moan, his hands fluttering uselessly over his boy as he bleeds out.

"What do we do, what do we do, what the hell do we do –"

"I – at the farm I live on," and the man is sitting up, his eyes terrified but determined, "the man who owns the place is a doctor, we can go there."

Adrenaline drags through Rick, pumps acid into his muscles. His various aches and throbs recede for as long as it takes him to cradle Carl's body, lift him and start running in the direction the man pointed. The woods morph into fields with no end in sight, and every breath he takes skewers his lungs.

Shane's snapping at the man for falling behind, and they really can't wait. "How far?" Rick shrieks, and it's a half-mile, a half-mile, he'll make it, Carl can make it. He's crying out against his will in grunts and hisses, but he doesn't stop moving for a second, only to adjust his son's body when his grip starts slipping. Carl limp in his arms like Sophia's rag doll, and why can't he protect anyone anymore?

The doctor he's supposed to find, Hershel, he takes Carl, and he's going to make everything okay. Bizarre catatonic hysteria, and Rick laughs to himself even as he throws the random dramatic-sounding words together. He wanders out to meet Shane, and Carl's shooter asks after him but Rick can't answer, his mind fuzzed over and body dense as slag. He's never felt anything else.

Shane breaks him out of his trance by wiping a towel over his face. "You got blood, man" he says, sounding worse than Rick feels and it's almost unthinkable. He presses the towel into Rick's hands, gentle as a mother._Lori_, Rick finally thinks, and the tears start welling up again.

"My wife doesn't know," he tells Hershel and his group, and Shane shushes him, soft nonsensical words of comfort in his ear, grasping his neck tightly as his shoulders tremble with pathetic whimpering sobs.

Morgan and Duane gone from the radar. Sophia missing. Carl wailing and in pain, Carl as still and pale as the sheet he's lying on. Rick's list of sins are growing longer and longer. Now he knows that the Christ carving looked upon him with scorn.

_mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. i'm so sorry, darling._

"Lori has to be here, Shane, she has to know," Rick says, feeling drained and boneless and helpless, the worst way to be.

Shane nods. "Okay, I get that. I'm gonna handle it. But you gotta handle your end." His voice is a beacon and Rick can finally find his way to salvation now, be strong for Carl because Shane tells him he needs to be. Shane cups the side of his head and it's the easiest thing for Rick to bump his forehead to Shane's and close his eyes, soak up his best friend's faith and love.

They'll be alright. They're making a way to fix this. Lori will be here soon, and Daryl would've found Sophia by now.

They'll be just fine.


	5. interlude i:all this hum and awful noise

T-Dog has always been a little clumsy. Not exactly the kind that constantly warranted good-natured teasing and mockery, just the kind that made him, well. Silly, if only to his perception to himself.

Back when the world was still sane, he wouldn't realize that he had a bruise on his shin or a scratch on his arm if someone didn't point it out to him, and would only then recall bumping into a coffee table, snagging his hoodie on a chain link as he sneaked in with his buds into the basketball court in the early morning hours. He'd learned early on to focus wholly on the task at hand, and it helped when he started volunteering in his church's soup kitchen, otherwise he'd be chopping off his fingers along with whatever vegetables they'd be serving that day.

He forgets this very basic principle for one second and tears his heroin veins open on broken glass, painting a neon sign plastered above his head to point the incoming herd right to him, their free-for-all buffet.

_stupid stupid supid_, T-Dog chants over and over, stumbling against cars no better than bleached bones on a highway. He's blinded by agony, a vague secondhand terror overtaking everything else. He's going to die. It's a fleeting statement of truth, almost amazingly simple. Half a minute is all he has left in his lungs.

A walker comes veering into his direction, and he startles, trips over a carcass, almost like how he used to trip over pizza boxes on the floor of his flat, and he wants to laugh, or cry, something, anything. But there's just the resonating thrum of sorrow at the thought that he won't get to at the very least die on his feet.

Then the redneck kid appears, buries his knife through the walker's skull, and for one long moment T-Dog thinks that that blade's going into him next, finally be rid of the nigger that left his dad behind. But Daryl holds an engine-greased finger to his shushing lips, and T-Dog lets himself be manhandled to the ground, the half-rotting geek draped over him like a scarf. _Like camouflage_, he corrects himself, when he sees Daryl do the same, and he almost calls out, "you're smarter than you look, man," but then the walkers start trickling in, and he wisely holds his breath.

An eternity passes before the death rattles finally fade into the distance, and Daryl hauls him to a sitting position, slaps his red rag over the gushing cut. "Keep pressure on it, don't move," he says, stern like he's daring T-Dog to disagree, and props him up against a car. He darts off with his crossbow raised on the offensive, disappears into the maze of metal. T-Dog feels involuntary chuckles ebb from him at the same pace he's bleeding out, because what a world indeed it's become. What a world.

And there are screams.

He tries to stand up and find out what's happening, but Daryl's striding back, tight expression on his face and a blue T-shirt in his grip. "Who was that, what's going on –"

"Little girl ran off, walkers tailin her, but Rick's on it." His voice is oddly tense, muted in its intensity but there in the set of his furrowed brows. He starts cleaning away the blood and grime around T-Dog's wound, taking a lot more care than expected. There's nothing but ethyl alcohol to disinfect it, and it's like fire, like being branded.

"Oh goddamn," T-Dog groans through gritted teeth, and Daryl smirks, quit-whining shape to his mouth as he binds the shirt around the arm with electrical tape. T-Dog trembles, doesn't make another noise.

His mind wanders back to Sophia, and Rick, and he prays they're both okay. He's not the only one that deserves to be this lucky.

Daryl waves a striped button-down in front of him to get his attention. "Y'maybe wanna change?" he asks, and T-Dog looks down at himself, grimaces in agreement. The front of his plain gray shirt has grown sticky and marooned with blood. Then he becomes conscious of something.

"Hey, did you go through my pack?"

Daryl lifts an eyebrow, vaguely amused. "Yeah. That blue shirt is yours too."

No wonder those shirts looked familiar. T-Dog huffs, doesn't press the issue though he wants to. Instead:

"Thank you."

A beat, and Daryl's eyes widen at him slightly, those precious few millimeters that betray just how young he really is, and he nods fast, pulls out his knife again. "Gonna hafta cut this off ya, seein as y'can't lift your arm" is all he says, crumpling the hem of T-Dog's shirt between his fingers, tugging it away from his body.

T-Dog knows a roundabout way of acknowledgement when he sees one, and grins feebly, lets Daryl take care of him a bit more.

Andrea finds him some blessedly clean gauze and some iodine as they clear the roads, but come the morning and the midday sun beating off the asphalt, the throb in T-Dog's arm feels rooted in his very core. Time compresses, and he can't remember when he started babbling crazy to Dale. Something about not caring that he's been left behind to die, he's got what's coming to him. "Who's gonna be first to get lynched in a scenario like this?" he asks the old man, though he doesn't need to know the answer to that, because when he was in high school his second cousin once knocked up a white girl and a week later they found him dead from where the girl's lawman daddy dragged him behind his pickup by his cock and balls, where they'd tugged until they'd torn off and he bled out. T-Dog had retreated into church service after that, left his smoking and his violent life behind, but it's found him again and he's done fighting it. He's done.

That lovely fever blur again, and it's now approaching dusk, bits of gold clinging doggedly to the purpled clouds. Only half the group comes back, because Carl's been shot. T-Dog can barely wrap his head around it, dismayed beyond belief at their luck that just won't stop going bad. But he's too busy hunching against the RV, trying to fight chills only he can feel, a threadbare towel his piss-poor shield. And then Dale is coming over with a bottle of antibiotics, and he swallows the pills thumbed into his palm even if it goes down like sandpaper.

Once again the redneck kid has saved him, and it shouldn't surprise him anymore.

He hobbles over to Daryl right before he and Glenn leave for the farm. The kid's scrubbing furiously at the leather seat and muttering about oil stains. T-Dog ignores the SS insignia gleaming proud on the gas tank, taps Daryl's arm.

"Wha'sit now?" he grouses, not looking up until T-Dog ups and shoves the pack of cigarettes his way. He brightens up immediately, small gatorlike smile. "Man, how'd you know?"

T-Dog shrugs with his good shoulder. "I know withdrawal symptoms when I see 'em."

Daryl squints at the carton, snorts, "Marlboro's for pussies," but sticks one in his mouth and lets T-Dog light it for him anyway. He tries to give it back but T-Dog doesn't budge.

"S'the least I could do for my hero," he says, high teasing ring to it, and Daryl coughs, half a laugh, rolls his eyes.

"Your loss," he says as he pockets the carton, cranes his neck back to let loose a wavery smoke ring into the lavender sky, showing off, and T-Dog has to grin no matter how taxing it feels.

* * *

Daryl reminds her of Amy.

They can't be further removed from each other, true, despite the shared vulgarity, or the easy beauty of youth, or even the charred yellow hair.

No, it's the stubbornness, something not quite blind faith but cemented deep enough within the bones. "Am I the only one Zen around here?" Daryl grumbles after looking straight at Carol and insisting that her little girl would be just fine, and Andrea hears her sister's six-year-old voice claiming _come on, andy, if we stay up we can catch santa coming down the chimaninny._

The kind of all-encompassing conviction that's a little hard to not get caught up in, something she desperately needs right now.

"I don't know if I want to live, or if I have to…or if it's just a habit," she tells him, and it's true. Her lungs expand freely, her pulse careens madly when she stares death in its rotted eye sockets twice, but there's a horrible emptiness in her that was only made clear when Amy left her in this world alone. She looks Daryl in the eye and sees no judgment or pity, just. Understanding. The barest nod, and an arrow to the dangling walker's head for her troubles. A mammoth weight feels lifted from her with every step of the way back.

"What was that blue stuff in Merle's bag of goodies?" she asks him, partly because she wants to fill the silence, partly because she's been wondering ever since she saw so many drugs in one place that wasn't a college party.

"Why, you plannin on getting high?" Daryl counters with a smirk she doesn't need illumination to see. "S'crystal."

Huh. "I've never seen it come in that color before."

Daryl shifts his torch to his other hand, blaring light bobbing off the treeline. "'Cause it's a real kicker. Merle ran the dealings in mosta our area for the two guys who cooked it so he'd get his personal share cheaper. Made me his delivery boy, sometimes." He aims the flashlight in Andrea's face again and she winces, solid white behind her eyes for a full second before she swats it away. "So you been round hard drugs b'fore."

It's not a question, and she smiles, remembering another time, a fucked up young woman with nowhere to vent her frustrations but through trying everything she could get her hands on. "Of course; why do you think I became a lawyer?"

He actually laughs, and it's a pretty sound. Andrea doesn't realize she's observed this aloud until she hears a strangled noise and points her flashlight at him, finds him looking back all guarded and watchful. There's a visible blush on his face, almost funny to see with how hardass he acts all the time, and again with Amy's soft giggle, "he looks so _young_, do you think he's even legal," the day he stepped into the camp, and she can't help the surge of protectiveness she feels towards him after that, this boy like an orphan out of a fairytale.

Daryl offers to take watch but she shoots him down; his eyes are shadow-weighted and he's nearly dead on his feet, a grateful tilt of his head before he disappears inside the RV.

The dawn filters through the milky clouds and she finds a bucket of paint, dips her fingers in it to spell out Sophia's name on the dirty windshield of a car. The paint isn't water-based, and it gets on her blouse, a little tangled in her hair.

Right before they leave, she sees Daryl at the edge of the hill Sophia tumbled down from, fiddling with his father's plastic baggie, his gaze unreadable. Then he steps back, lets the whole thing fly, watching it arch into the air and land with a crack below. Andrea schools her face and looks away before he can catch her irrationally proud smile.

The farm stretches so wide, smothers all she knows. And Carl is out of danger, T-Dog already up and about to greet them at the door, and she embraces him happily, recalling how he sweated and cursed from pain the day before.

Daryl meets Andrea's eyes and gives her a tiny grin, and after a couple of seconds she realizes she's streaked faint white onto T-Dog's back.

In turn, she winks at him. It's a natural reflex, she thinks, to cheeky younger siblings in on a secret joke. It's just the way it's going to be.


	6. the hard, sharp outlines of things

Carl's motionless against the white cloud of the bed sheets, the only sign of life his narrow ribcage rising and falling. But he doesn't look as bad as Daryl imagined he'd still be. His father's the one who actually looks worse for the wear, face all drawn and haggard, new lines on his forehead. It makes something wrench in Daryl's chest, the way Rick looks eroded and numb even in sleep, one hand still curled under his chin.

Daryl's never been to anyone's sickbed, or dealt with anything like this, period. No clue as to the etiquette required in such a situation, so he settles for rapping swiftly at the doorframe, and watches Rick straighten up in his seat, blink at him. "Hey," he says, sleep-rumpled tone that makes Daryl shiver, for some reason.

"Hey," he mumbles back, trying not to scratch too awkwardly at the nape of his neck. "I found a farmhouse maybe five miles down from here. Looked like someone spent the night in one of the cupboards."

"Sophia?"

"Wasn't anywhere near. But it's real likely."

Long considering moment, and Rick sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. "Alright. There's no telling where she could've gone from there, but now that more of us'll be looking tomorrow, we can cover more ground quickly. You think you'll be able to point the place out on the map?"

Daryl nods, says hastily, "We can sort shit out tomorrow, man." Every minute Rick stays conscious is taking a year off his life, or that's what it looks like from here anyways.

Rick lets out a soft amused sound. "There's a 'we' now, huh?"

Daryl shrugs, fidgets. It'll take a joint effort to find Sophia, he knows, and now that he's seen firsthand how merely a flower and a story have brought so much comfort to this girl's mother, he's ready to make nice and cooperate.

"So you're sticking around?" Rick continues, and there's something in how he says it that makes him grin slightly, say:

"Got nothin on my schedule,"

and Rick's smile takes root in the rick dark soil of Daryl's young heart, somewhere it has no reason to be.

* * *

Daryl's picked a prime spot to settle, right where the forest begins, the whole lay of the land unobscured by trees and meddlesome people, forty yards away from everything and everyone. The one thing he has for company is a stone chimney that must be a hundred years old, all that remains of a farmer's cottage. He has his tent pitched, a dark green two-man that's now for one, and his first thought is that he can finally beat off without Merle cackling out every lame innuendo known to man.

_thank god for officer friendly handcuffing that asshole, then_, he laughs to himself, half sincerity, half slow boiling guilt. He spread-eagles himself onto his sleeping mat, watching the cherry of his cigarette glow steadily, the smoke waft its way out of the tent to join the stars, and he thinks about his father, left out in the cold.

And the picture in his head gets all morphed, fucked up. He wonders about Rick cuffed to the headboard of a tiny bed, slick with sweat and twisting helplessly beneath him. He wonders so much, with his hand down his shorts and the filter of the cigarette grinded between his teeth, small huffs of breath escaping him to echo too loudly in the still night. The crawling shame he feels after that is not easy to tamp down.

He wipes himself off as best he can, jerks the tent flap zipper down entirely to let the cloying smell out. He rolls over onto his stomach, waits for sleep to come.

Daryl has only been this way for four days, but it already feels like a lifetime.

Not much later, the brightening sky has him wriggling out of his tent, standing barefoot on the damp grass to twist his back, muted crackle-pops making him wince. He's hungry, but that's nothing new.

Rick's not wearing his sheriff's uniform anymore. Daryl's trying to parse out what it means but he supposes it just doesn't matter anymore. There's nothing much left of the old world order that makes sense to hold on to. Rick looks better now after a night of proper rest, not like a particularly gutsy breeze could knock him over if it tried hard enough. A button's been left undone on his shirt and Daryl can see the smooth dip of a clavicle under pale skin, the beginnings of gently curling hair. He all but barrels into Dale's RV, exhaling hard as he paws through the old man's closet for something to cover his threadbare tank top. He finds a long-sleeved flannel shirt that he knows once belonged to Jim, and it helps subdue his mood.

"Everyone's getting new search grids today," Rick says, pointing out the places on the map where Sophia could have gone. The teenage guy whose name Daryl hasn't bothered to learn yet comes up with his hands in his pockets, offering to help. "I know the area pretty well and stuff," he says lamely, and Daryl ignores him, pulls on the flannel shirt, unimpressed.

Rick's gaze is assessing. "Hershel's okay with this?"

"You let him help, don't you?" the kid asks, with a not so subtle gesture Daryl's way at the word _him_, and Daryl scowls.

"The fuck's that supposed t'mean?" he asks sharply, and the kid's muddy eyes go wide, turning back towards Rick, beseeching. "He said I should ask you about it," he continues, and Daryl scoffs, fastens his buttons and lets the matter lie, though something prickles him when Rick accepts the kid's offer.

Shane pipes up from where he's hobbled to the shotgun seat of the jeep. "Nothing about what Daryl found screams Sophia to me. Anyone coulda been holed up in that farmhouse."

"Anybody includes her, right? It's a good lead," Andrea counters, encouraging Daryl with a small smile from under the shadow of her straw hat. Rick nods in assent, adds, "Maybe we'll pick up her trail again."

The hope is growing in strength on Rick's face, the corners of his eyes, and Daryl gets more light-headed the longer he stares. He coughs, points to the ridge of land some miles out. "I'ma borrow a horse, go up here, take a bird's-eye view of the whole grid. If she's up there, I'll spot her."

T-Dog grins slyly. "Good idea. Maybe you'll see your chupacabra up there too." It's not malicious teasing, just a little jab that has Daryl burning from mortification anyway, especially when Dale expounds on that bullshit story he'd scrounged up on his first night at the camp. Rick is smiling at him all throughout the retelling, a small sliver of it but a smile nonetheless, and Daryl gives a silent cheer that Rick is slowly regaining the ability.

An incredulous snigger from the kid ruins the moment, though, and Daryl snaps, "What're you brayin at?"

"You believe in a bloodsucking dog?" he asks, with an ill thought burst of teenage self-assurance.

"You believe in dead people walkin around?" Daryl shoots back.

That cows the kid, and he reaches for the shotgun Dale's placed on the hood instead, all stilted and awkward. No wonder Daryl keeps calling him 'kid' in his head. They may be roughly the same age but the difference is startling.

"Hey, hey." Rick takes the gun out of his reach. "Ever fire one before?"

The kid pushes his shoulders up, defiant. "Well, if I'm going out, I want one."

"Yeah, and people in hell want Slurpees," Daryl snorts, and is pleased when he sees Andrea hide a grin behind her hand. He slings on his crossbow and strides away. The band's starting to give, and he should find another backpack strap to desecrate soon, to replace this old one.

Hershel isn't at the stables, and Daryl figures he doesn't have the luxury of asking permission, when he can beg for forgiveness afterwards. He chooses a chestnut brown mare with a white stripe down her nose, and he smiles, strokes her smooth side, remembering the one grand time that Jess taught him how to ride a young stallion of the very same colors.

Of course, that was at a slaughterhouse and that horse was cut up for meat the following day, but never mind that.

Rick walks up to him as Daryl eases the mare into a steady trot. "You certainly handle horses better than I do," he says, same fond amusement on his face as before, and Daryl feels his pulse ratchet up in his fingertips, from where they're tightly gripping his thigh. "Did Glenn ever tell you how I got to Atlanta?"

Not really sure where this is going, Daryl shakes his head. Rick laughs and the sound takes him by surprise, squeezing off all of his air for a second. "I came across a horse after I ran out of gas. I could barely control it, but it was worth feeling like John Wayne. Let's just hope you don't end up like it did."

Daryl expected the little sideways admission of worry, after their chats from yesterday. He didn't expect the hand clasped around his knee, or the molten hooks burying themselves into his bellybutton at that, tugging downward. Rick must sense how Daryl's muscles have tensed under his touch, and quickly takes his hand away, coughs a bit. He looks about as chagrined as Daryl feels.

In Daryl's scrabbling attempt to look anywhere but at Rick, his eyes land on Shane, and the man is glaring at him with nothing short of murder.

He kicks at his steed's sides, and she nickers, continues forward. His neck aches from the exertion of forcing himself not to look back. There's an idea coming too close to the forefront of his mind, and he tries to shove it into a locker and throw away the key, but it's still glowing like a siren, despite all its improbability.

Because Daryl's not unfamiliar to the same skim of both a girl's and a boy's gaze on him, down and back up. He's seen how people are always surprised to find that they're attracted to this scrappy redneck kid, seen the widening of their eyes, the hopeful crimp in their mouths. Lord knows it surprises him.

And the way that very same look is beginning to grow in stages on Rick's face, it doesn't help the little siren at the back of his mind, wailing _what if what if what if_.

Daryl's not gay. He's just thinking about it, is all. It's not like he'll ever do anything as stupid as that.

And that holds true up until he kisses Rick Grimes ten hours later.

* * *

Consciousness comes back in waves, lapping softly at the banks of his pitch black mind. Daryl can only barely open his eyes to the canopy of leaves green as a parrot, sunlight winking through. His head has been hit hard enough that it doesn't feel like pain at all, just a distant confusion as to why he's flat on his back again and cold all over. And someone's crouched before his prone body, sneering:

"Why y'ain't pulled that arrow out yet, boy? Y'can bind yer wound better."

Daryl grins messily, big goofy thing he never wears anymore. "Dad."

"Ha! Now that I'm outta your hair, it's 'dad' again, huh? You a baby again? Crybaby cry, cry cry crybaby."

The old song warped under Merle's breath, and Daryl's elation melts away completely. He's only ever had two emotions when it came to his father, each the extreme polar opposite of the other. "Fuck you."

"Mm-mm. Yer the one fucked from the looks of it. All them years I spent tryna make a man o'you, this what I get? Look atcha. Good as dead. An' for what?"

"Girl," Daryl slurs, quiet and doomed-sounding. "They lost a little girl."

"Y'got a thing for little girls now? Better'n grown men, I guess. I ain't havin a Dixon be a faggot bendin over for a buncha niggers and democrats and _cops_, when y'ain't even lookin for yer old man no more."

Daryl snipes at him wearily, his heart not in it. "Shuttup. Y'shoulda stayed put." His tongue is sluggish, wet cement thick. "We wen'back for you. Rick an' I, we did right by ya."

"This the same Rick that cuffed me t'that rooftop? Forced me ta cut off my own hand? You that fucker's bitch now?"

He bares his teeth at his father, the specter of him that has both hands still intact. "I ain'nobody's bitch."

"A mistake, s'what ya are. Y'ain't nothing but a mistake."

"An' what about Jess?" Merle's half-brother, his half-uncle. The only person who ever truly gave two shits about him. "He a mistake too?"

"Oh, I prayed every day for a baby brother. But I never asked for you. Yer just some dumb bitch's problem that became mine when she offed herself. You was never s'posed ta be _born_, little boy."

Daryl moans in frustration, tears prickling his eyes, his father's voice as vivid as the murmuring river, but he knows it's only a memory. This has been the soundtrack of his life ever since childcare services dumped him at this man's doorstep when he was seven years old.

"I never even laid a hand on you like my daddy did, 'cause you weren't even worth the trouble. And yer new friends? Someday they gon'scrape you off their heels like the dogshit you are."

Merle's tight hold on his face is too real, casual in its devastation. He shakes Daryl gruffly.

"Ain't nobody ever gon'do the Christian thing and keep you alive 'cept me, boy. Ain't nobody ever will. Now up on yer feet 'fore I kick yer damn teeth in."

He had learned early on to always do what his father says.

* * *

Daryl wakes up shivering.

His pants have been peeled off, his boots and socks removed. Not being dressed the same as he was when he fell asleep makes him suspect that the whole thing had been a dream. His head still hurts. Maybe his head will always hurt from now on.

He doesn't know how long he's been lying there, on his side with the blankets bunched up to his chin, staring at the opposite paper-blank wall when Carol comes in. "I brought you some dinner," she says, setting a tray of eggs and beans on the side table. "How are you feeling?"

Daryl would roll his eyes if it didn't hurt too much. "As good as I look."

Carol smiles for some reason, sad and grateful. "You did more for my little girl today than her daddy ever did in his whole life. Thank you."

Well. Daryl toys with the cloth clutched in his fingers, for lack of anything better to do. "Wasn't nothin Rick or Shane wouldn't have done."

"I know. You're every bit as good as them. Every bit."

Carol's lips are butterfly-light on the side of his forehead, just under the bullet he got for his troubles. Even after she's quietly shut the door behind her he can't help thinking about his mother. Pale gold of her hair, getting carried around with the clothes in the laundry basket, curled up together on the couch because she'd sold the bed long ago. Words more remembered than the voice that had said them. _my daryl, how__'__s my daryl_, and he closes his eyes, so exhausted all of a sudden.

There's a knock at the door, this time, and Daryl's about to snarl "go away" when Rick asks, "Daryl? You awake?"

Rick! Daryl's heart clenches, stutters; he's in such a weird mood. "C'mon in," he manages to say, and Rick steps through, rubbing absently at his shoulder, mouth curving upward.

"I've got a bunch of ears on a string that I have no idea what to do with."

Daryl huffs. He didn't even realize that was missing from around his neck until Hershel was tugging his tank top off him to get at his bolt wound. What he can't seem to forget is Rick's screams when he dropped like a sack of potatoes, or his head lolling against Rick's sweat-damp shoulder.

"Gonna throw em away?"

"I already hung them on that chimney structure beside your tent." Rick sits at the foot of the bed, his smile growing more pensive. "You're gonna have to stay here a day or two more. Your camp's way too far for you to keep going back and forth."

Daryl's still a little rattled by the fact that Rick walked all the way out there at dusk just to keep his trinkets safe. "Nah, I'll make Andrea move my tent as penance for shootin me."

Rick hums as if to say good call, good call. There's a companionable silence before Daryl asks, "Ain'tcha tired of holdin bedside vigils?"

"Just wanted to see that you're okay. Not that you'd tell me if anything was wrong," Rick says without heat, right on the money. Looking at him is having some strange alchemic effect on Daryl, mixing with the head injury and painkillers and fatigue. Rick's watchful eyes, his rough hands, the way his too-girly mouth shapes his gentle words, and all of it shakes through Daryl something awful.

He pretends to shift as he drags his blanket lower. "I'd tell you," he murmurs, wetting his lips a bit. He doesn't miss how Rick tracks the movement, the stymied bob of his Adam's apple telling Daryl all he needs to know.

_he wants me_, he crows in his mind, and with that he sits up. It makes him dizzy, a sloshing sensation in his cranium but he fists his hand in Rick's collar anyway, closes the space between them and fits their mouths together.

Rick grabs at Daryl's arm like he's trying to throw him off, his mouth opening mostly from utter shock but Daryl can roll with that. He sucks at Rick's lower lip, licks his way inside and Rick's tongue against his strikes sparks. This odd whining sound issues from the back of Daryl's throat, and he has to pull away, press his forehead against Rick's shoulder again, the breath knocked out of him in quite a different way this time.

"Daryl." Rick sounds broken, even a little bit confused. "You. You can't _do_ that. Lori –"

"The hell I can't. Thought the law don't exist no more." He can't spare his focus for anything beyond the physical, Rick's pulse thrumming against Daryl's skin.

Rick pushes him away, hands around his shoulders, holding him up and at arm's length. "You're acting like a child."

And Daryl just has to say, "Technically I am one."

Rick goes still. His face freezes and his arms tense and he stares at Daryl. "Beg pardon?"

And he has to add, "Well, sixteen, but if y'wanna stretch your definition a bit…"

Rick's eyes are comically huge, but Daryl doesn't feel like laughing. "Daryl. You're sixteen?"

"Yeah. Gonna do somethin about it?" and his voice cracks like he's exactly as old as he is and he loathes it.

Rick seems to have shut down. He can't look at Daryl anymore. "Excuse me," he exhales, and all but flees the room.

The silence this time is unbearable.

* * *

That night, Daryl dreams for the first time in a long while.

He's standing in the middle of the tiny apartment where his mama died, and the fire is still everywhere but it's his fault. Everything he touches goes up in flames.

And instead of Mama it's Rick on the couch, still in those fucking handcuffs and nothing else. "All your fault," he rasps, his voice garish with smoke, his hair lighting up when Daryl runs his hand through it. "Daryl."

"It wasn't supposed to be like this," Daryl weeps, and he's seven years old again, worthless little boy just like Merle said he is. The ceiling has caught, charred plaster crumbling and raining around them like ash.

Rick shakes his head. His skin is sluicing off his bones. "That's not good enough."

Daryl's jolted awake and he throws up Carol's dinner all over the floor. No matter how hard he tries, the pain won't go away.


	7. our fortune teller cards

Rick can't sleep and maybe he won't ever be able to again.

Lori took it the way he expected, when he told her what had happened right before they retired for the night. Watched as her eyes flickered and caught and went wide, hand going to cover her mouth. Nodded dutifully as she murmured "that poor boy" and curled around him, and she's fallen asleep probably thinking about how Carl took his first shaky steps out of bed and around the house just earlier.

She never discusses the kiss, because he never mentions it.

It just doesn't feel right, he thinks as he stares at the ceiling long enough that his night vision kicks in and he can make out the precarious looking water stains up there, brown and blistered soft. It would only humiliate Daryl, to have all tarnation know about what he did in his concussed, half-drugged stupor. He definitely wouldn't want that embarrassing mistake spread around.

But truth be told, Rick doesn't know why _he_ doesn't want to mention it. It's not okay and it shouldn't be okay but half an hour ago Daryl admitted he's sixteen and kissed him and it's, somehow, at least as far as he's concerned. It's okay.

His wife's breathing is even and ticklish against his shoulder and Rick stays awake a while more, tries to smother every bad thought with stars.

* * *

"Sixteen. Christ, that explains why he's a pain in the ass."

Shane's hand has landed on the back of his head, old gesture of bafflement Rick knows well. The rest of the group is still shocked by the announcement, unsure of how to react. Glenn finally comments, "He's the same age as Beth. It kinda freaks me out."

Beth. Hershel's younger daughter, pretty little thing with innocence making her eyes so wide, and Rick's stomach does a slow flop wondering where Daryl's innocence has gone. "And it makes me feel worse about sending him out there by himself," he says. "Look what happened."

"Hey, if we're playing the blame game, I tried to shoot him in the head," Andrea snorts. She's red-faced from dragging Daryl's tent and gear back to the main camp, and she stands stiffly now, gnawing over and over on her lower lip.

"He's only four years older than Sophia," Carol whispers, blanching. "Four years."

Dale, ever trying to process things in a reasonable fashion, steps forward. "Now hold on, everyone. If it's a matter of responsibility you're worried about, Daryl's proved himself more than alright. He may be quite young but he's smart, resourceful, a crack shot with that crossbow of his, and certainly old enough to think for himself. Everything he's done so far has been his choice, and we shouldn't bear burdens that aren't even there."

Rick wants to object, wants to cry out _he's a child, we protect our children_, but Andrea cuts in. "You know what, Dale's right. Daryl would feel terrible if he knew we were talking about him like he doesn't have a mind of his own, and he'll definitely not like it if everyone starts treating him like he's made of glass. I should know."

Everyone's banked by the memory of Andrea's attempt to take her life for a moment, then Glenn asks the million dollar question: "Wait, did he even tell you to tell us this?"

"That never came up, no," Rick says slowly, and as if summoned, the front door to the Greene house slams open and shut, and Daryl hobbles down the steps with Jimmy awkwardly trying to support him. "Ain't a damn cripple, leave me be," he growls, almost a shout, trying to teeter out of the other teen's reach. He's in a shirt much too big for him, his arm a solid bar across his stomach as if that can keep the pain at bay. Jimmy gives up and just follows from a safe distance behind.

Nobody even bothers to hide their stares, and Rick watches Daryl's usual scowl morph into abject horror, has to rush up ahead to stop him from making a scene.

"What didja tell em," he hisses, all huge panicked eyes and flimsy bravado, and Rick's already shaking his head.

"Only that you're sixteen. They didn't need to know about anything else," he says, as low and reassuring as he can. Rick would like to believe that he doesn't see how Daryl can't look away from his mouth, or how he in turn can't look away from the trail of dried blood still decorating Daryl's temple, crooked and skinny as a blighted vine.

Daryl shoulders past him all the same, face now set in an emotionless mask, making a beeline for the haven of his tent. He pulls off the shirt and lobs it Jimmy's way, barking "I ain't wearin no dead man's shit" before disappearing inside. Rick only gets a quick glimpse of it, but a new coat of red has stained the padding over Daryl's arrow wound.

Andrea's smiling, for some reason. "Teenagers are familiar territory," she tells Rick, and fishes a worn paperback out of her knapsack, waves it like a magic charm. "I'll handle it."

Rick nods, grateful for that. He doesn't think he can take any more close encounters with Daryl right now, or ever.

* * *

Everyone turns out better than expected at the firing range. Andrea's cluster of bull's eyes is mere half-inches apart, and alright, Rick's impressed. He can't remember being that sharp with a gun on his first day at the academy. Carl's good with the revolver, and he turns to Rick after knocking off a tin can, big grin swallowing up his face.

"Got it," he says proudly, and Rick clasps him by the small of his back.

"Yeah, buddy, that was great. Think you can do it more than once?"

Carl all but puffs up, and Rick has to laugh, pat his sheriff's hat down better on his son's head. "Alright then, I'll set the bottles up."

Lori stops him with a wry smile. "Oh, we'll do it," she says, gesturing to where Beth's hovering behind her. "He's doing better than I thought he would."

Rick kisses her forehead. "If Daryl can do it, he can." He doesn't talk about how with the level of expertise he has, Daryl must have been handling firearms since he could hold them up without tipping over from the weight. Did he think that made him cool, at that tender age, or did he wish he could complain about schoolwork and have his mom scold him and tuck him in at night?

He heads for the copse of trees to try and flee his thoughts, where Shane is leaned back and guzzling from a water bottle. He hands it to Rick without looking at him, too busy scouring the fields even if Carol has the binoculars.

"You remember when we played chicken out?" he asks out of the blue, and Rick's taken aback for a moment before groaning.

"Oh god. Don't remind me. We were punks back then."

Shane grins thinly. "Yeah, tryna finish a whole smoke and you pussied out –"

"We both did, if I remember correctly. And that's why you came up with that stupid idea."

"And you followed."

"And look how great that turned out." Rick presses their forearms together to prove his point, penny-sized keloids lining up, the one on Rick's a mirror to Shane's. He remembers being fifteen and finally as broad and tall as the other boys, forgetting the new length of his limbs, the twist of his body out of Shane's hold in a scuffle. Shane always pissed off and playing with a lighter because it made him look badass, but Rick always had the lit cigarette and that upped his badassery points by a mile. Not that he could hold the smoke in without tearing up and hacking like his aunt with tuberculosis, and Shane sneering _bet ya couldn't handle a burn without cryin either_. Sitting for what felt like hours with the innocuous white stick squashed between their sunbaked arms until the sky dusked over and Rick saying _c'mon, let's call it a draw, i'm starving _is the only thing that got them home.

Fast forward to more than two decades later and very little has stayed the same. Whatever recklessness Rick had has bled out into Shane, a low-simmering double edge to his every word and to his every flick of a gaze to Rick's family, like he thinks he's so subtle about it.

It hurts Rick. It truly does. He didn't want to believe that Shane could do that to him, that Lori could do that to him. She would have her reasons (like thinking he was already dead), but Shane. Rick's still trying to forgive him, only putting on a brave face because lord knows the two of them need the illusion that everything's fine. They all need the illusion that everything's fine.

There's one thing that's stayed the same about him after so long, though. He won't back down in a fight, even if it means it'll be Shane he's fighting. Shane, who knows all his tells and weak spots. Shane, his best friend.

"You gonna tell me what's up with you and Daryl?"

Well, that came completely out of left field. Rick only barely manages not to choke on his next gulp of water. "Well, I did blab something about him he wanted me to keep secret," he says, sounding normal enough.

"S'more than that." Shane's eyes are darker than they usually look, probing, assessing.

All your tells and weak spots, Rick reminds himself, and he tries not to stumble over what he says next. "It's not, Shane. Really. He's just a confused kid, it's tough growing up as it is, let alone in this world."

Shane isn't convinced, and crosses his arms, a tiny wedge of his teeth showing as he bites his lip. "Man, it's just. That little twink's been mooning over you, and I wouldn't worry bout it 'cept you been looking at him the way he does you."

_the way you look at my wife?_ Rick wants to retort, but then he realizes belatedly the full implication of Shane's statement, and he runs out of ways to explain himself.

"I'ma take Andrea to that advanced class now," Shane says after a while, and Rick's left feeling splintered, unfinished somewhat.

"Where'd you learn how to shoot?" he asks T-Dog later, when they're checking how much ammo they have left and the rest are piling back into the cars. T-Dog's orange shirt has gone brown with sweat but he looks happy as a clam clipping the magazine for his Beretta back in.

"Sixteen and my cousins put a glock in my hand," he says, absently patting his pockets down for the keys to his jeep. "Was gonna rob a dollar store so I could join their gang." He frowns at Rick as if gauging any possible reactions. "I'll have you know that those assholes put blanks in instead of the real deal, so I never hurt nobody."

Rick grins, shakes his head. "In case you haven't noticed, I've lost the badge, T."

T-Dog's next smile is much more genuine, and he succeeds in fishing his errant keys out of hiding and tosses them to Rick. "Daryl's a better shot than me and he's a kid. Gotta get my game up."

Rick's amusement dies down a little at the reminder, Shane's leering words from earlier returning with something else that frightens him, and he has to lean into the jeep to steady himself. Poorly planned, overbearing sunlight and solid beige metal being what they are, and he jerks away with an undignified yelp.

"Whoa, you okay?" T-Dog asks, nothing but concerned and that only makes Rick feel even more of an idiot. The side of his hand hurts like hell, the burned spot shiny and swiftly too pink. But who is he to complain to a guy who's just survived an infected cut?

"I'm fine," he mutters, and empties what's left of the water bottle over the affected area. It works surprisingly well, the sting absolutely gone for a brief, blissful stretch and then gathering again at half-strength. He shakes it out for good measure, smiles sheepishly at T-Dog. "Just got lightheaded a bit there."

It's partially true. Eleven a.m. out here in the open and the heat feels animate, some feverish beast panting down his neck, smothering him.

Lori taps on the window from inside the jeep, her eyes questioning and worried, and Rick touches his fingertips to hers through the glass before he gets into the driver's seat. He doesn't have names for all the things happening inside him just now.

* * *

Rick's lived the confrontation a thousand times, in a hundred different ways; how the struts of the world would snap and it would all come tumbling down. Yet the matter of Lori's infidelity falls off the tracks, seems next to nothing compared to finding the abortion pills in their tent, its contents scattered like shards of bone.

"Do not put this on me!" he screams, the first time he's ever raised his voice to his wife and it's a gun blast tearing open the sky, a thousand bottles breaking at once and Lori's weeping.

"I don't know how we do this," she says, and Rick's mind is staggering from all the things he can say next. He wants to tell her that this isn't about them but the life growing inside her, what they should fight for, hope and faith and memory and a future they can recover. He wants to tell her that despite the unfortunate circumstances together they can overcome anything, but Rick's never been able to lie to Lori.

The whole ordeal is painful beyond belief but it's a good pain, a thorn twisted before it can be pulled free. He gathers her into his arms and kisses the crown of her head, sighs when she still can't stop crying. "No more secrets, okay?" he whispers, and she nods, clinging tightly to him and he should feel better but he doesn't.

There is a persistent voice in Rick's mind saying _tell her about daryl you hypocrite!_ and he keeps thinking back at it, _it didn't mean anything _and he gets nothing but a sullen silence in response.

He wonders bleakly if those words will ever ring true.

* * *

Rick comes out of the RV with the map and Daryl's smoking.

He actually misses that, he thinks as he watches Daryl tilt his head back against the tree, the flicking motion and fall of ash, the glow and the taste of paper. The smoke curling around his fingers like an old friend, rushing through his veins like the fountain of fucking youth and for a second Rick's that punk fifteen year old again who doesn't care what anyone thinks.

"Hell of a time to pick up a habit," he says aloud.

Daryl startles, stares at him like he's grown a second head. "Had this habit long b'fore the apocalypse," he says after a long pause, his breath white and catching in mussed-up hair.

Rick nods, folding and unfolding the map so he has something to do with his hands. "I'm sorry about what Shane said. He didn't mean any of it."

But he knows his words are empty, meaningless. Shane's mocking scorn was vicious and impossible to defend against, and from what little Rick's gathered about him, Daryl would much rather take three more arrows to the gut than have to live through what was said at the barn. Rick saw how Daryl's face fell terrifically before slipping an unaffected air of indignation back on again.

The kid (and he really _is_ a kid, the knowledge now branded into Rick's brain, crystalline and vibrant and frightening in many fundamental ways) snorts like an angry dragon, the cherry burning almost to the filter. "Yeah right." He throws the butt onto the ground, stomps on it with a grimace as the action pulls at the stitches in his side. "M'goin after the girl," he says, muttered and quick like a curse, and walks off, a stiffness to his gait as though he wants to crumple in on himself but doesn't.

Carol, who has been watching the whole scene unfold from where she's been wiping dishes clean, stands up. "Daryl, don't," she pleads, but Daryl's turned a deaf ear, goes straight for the stables anyway. She turns to Rick, imploring, "We can't let him back out there."

Rick gestures weakly to the farmhouse, indicating overall helplessness. "I still have to talk to Hershel."

"Then I'll go." Carol doesn't wait, flitting after him and Rick's alone again, not at all comfortable at the way this is all spiraling out of his control.

Andrea lays a hand on his arm, takes the map from him. "He wants to be the one to find her," she sighs. "Out of all of us, he deserves it the most."

Rick turns to her and she's looking right back, plain brown eyes steady as hell. He makes a noncommittal noise and tips his chin in acknowledgment.

"For Carol's sake, we all deserve to find Sophia."

* * *

They find Sophia.

* * *

The joint funeral is held in a weary, soul-depleting silence. There's hardly anything to say or do, at this point. Rick watches the Greene family mourn, not unaware of the fact that Daryl is watching him. Motionless and almost without blinking, Daryl is watching Rick.

If and when Hershel makes them leave his land, Rick won't rest until all of them are safe. He'll protect his family, this group, and drive them away from all this horror; he won't stop until they hit Fort Benning or any sanctuary they can afford. He owes it to each and every one of them. To Carol. To Daryl. Both of their losses indirectly caused by his actions, and Rick feels the weight of his guilt gathering like a black cloud above.

After everyone's dispersed, he finds himself staying behind. He tells himself it's not because in the shade of the nearby trees, Daryl has strapped on his crossbow and is trying to light a cigarette, failing because his hands are trembling.

Rick's body moves of its own accord, getting close enough that he can hear Daryl say _fuck_ emphatically over and over, and Daryl pockets his vices, a frustrated huff escaping him.

"You're going hunting?" Rick asks, the answer obvious when Daryl scoffs and crosses his arms with an indistinct harmless glare.

"Ain't got nothin better t'do."

Rick tries to remind him, "You still have those stitches. Hershel's going to have to take those out, but not for days yet."

Daryl's whole face grows sharper, harsher, and he spits, "I'm fuckin sick o' y'all tryna baby me when ya can't even protect a little girl. So _fuck off_."

Rick ignores that low blow, calls his name and something in how he does it makes Daryl stay, only the rigid line of his back and shoulders visible as he stays turned the other way.

"We just need to talk, Daryl," Rick says, hoping he doesn't sound too uncertain and feeble. "About something else."

Daryl whips around too quick, sheer with surprise and dread, his eyes white and huge. But then he shows Rick a smile that hangs half-aborted, tortured, and he says:

"Man, forget it. It didn't mean shit." He pauses, looking utterly broken for a moment and it hits Rick like a pellet to the heart, how _young_ this boy is. "And even if it did, what fuckin chance do I got, huh?"

Rick's reeling from the words, can't help but feel he's missing pieces to this puzzle. "I. Daryl?"

But Daryl's already retreating into the forest, long gone.


	8. one flight, one scene, one relapse

The turkey's smaller than ideal, scratching at the banks of the stream and making that _gobble gobble gobble_ sound that always cracked Daryl up when he was little. But its plumage looks decent enough for fletching, and it dies with an undignified squawk and a bolt through its plump body.

He kneels beside his kill, scoops up water with his hands. It tastes mossy and warm, not that he cares about that. He drinks until he's gasping, stares out into the forest in a low-key state of rage. The gritty feeling in his throat hasn't left at all.

Daryl had gone largely numb during Carol's self-pitying speech, during Sophia's funeral, some kind of protective response due to the wrath eroding the substratum of his patience, and there's no one, nothing to see him like this now.

"You motherfucker," he spits at the trees. He can say it a thousand different ways, but this is the darker end of the spectrum. "You mother_fucker_."

It's so hot. Every part of him that's been exposed to the sun feels shiny and much too tight. He picks out a handful of pebbles to hurl across the stream. His body likes the motion, the whip of his arm over top, the shifting balance of his weight from one leg to the other, pulse ticking up noticeably under his skin.

Handling it badly, he's just handling it very badly. For a second there he actually believed life would be on his side, that he'd find that little girl, and the bullet and the bolt in the process would be worth it to see her reunited with her mother. Hope is his stupidest trait, impossible to fix, like how he took to wearing his uncle's beaten leather jacket so maybe his father would love him too, like how he thinks there's a different shine to Rick's eyes now whenever he looks at Daryl. His whole existence has been seeded with landmines.

He hits a stump sticking out of the opposite bank like a stubby finger, hits it dead on, solid tonk that he can hear over the gabble of the stream. "Strike three, you're out," he mutters, and looks around involuntarily. Nothing, of course nothing, he doesn't know what he was expecting to see.

Daryl throws some more pebbles, but his hands are getting sweaty and the grip's no good, he's melting out here. He gathers up his turkey, trudges back to his camp like a convict leaving the sunlight for another twenty-three hours.

Three rabbits, a squirrel and the turkey are the grand total of his bounty, enough to spare him the indignity of crawling back to the farmhouse to beg for their scraps for a while. He's whittling pine down into shafts for his bolts when the footsteps approach, doesn't look up even as Lori calls out his name, crouches beside him too close to his personal space.

"Shane and T-Dog are busy, and the others are still tending to Beth. That leaves you." The anxiety in her voice feigning as conviction, and Daryl knows what's expected of him, but he's tired. And now his stomach hurts a bit, this sick throb like when he's run past his breath, heaving in air.

"Fetch 'em yourself. I got better things t'do," he sneers, and glances at Lori long enough to see her mouth go thin, her eyes wide and terribly dry. "Please, Daryl," she snaps, temper getting the better of her, and of him as well.

He's up on his feet without thinking, pointing his knife at her in an accusation of his own. "I'm done lookin for people, Olive Oyl, you have a nice ride if y'want those two idiots."

Daryl doesn't know why that particular moniker slips out in the shape of an insult, half-remembering his mother reading the comics section of old Sunday papers to him at the library and saying _thank god i don't look like that._ All stark angles and sharp points, nothing soft in Lori unless she looks upon her husband or their son, and a cold tail of misery coils against Daryl's ribs.

She leaves without a fuss after that. Daryl's not surprised to see a car rolling off the farm some time later, twilight pressing the landscape into sleek geometric shadows, dust-colored and slivered, concealing its getaway.

What does surprise him is Carol.

"Don't do this," she sighs, flash of white from her eyes skittering over Daryl. "I've already lost my girl." It makes him so irrationally angry, the gall of this woman to treat him like another placeholder, another child she can invest her affection in, oh lord help me save this lost soul. He jams the stick he's holding into the fire, making it spit sparks at the same time he does. "That wasn't my problem neither."

He retreats into his tent, waits for Carol to walk away before returning to put out the fire. It hisses in protest as he kicks dirt over it, and the sky's sliced up by trees, the shards crammed with stars, satellites and the moon, still so bright.

Daryl never saw his mother's grave again until eight years after she was buried, when he'd stolen his uncle's truck and driven back to her town. The groundskeeper had eyed him oddly when he came trudging by, and for good reason. The old fat bastard hadn't bothered to clear her headstone of weeds, or of the faded red paint defacing it. _Whore_, it proclaimed to all, _adulterer, burn in hell_. Their town was a typical little Bible-thumping town, but there was nothing righteous about him scrubbing that pitiful grave, or of a mother refusing to attend her daughter's funeral.

He hates this so much. He can never lie when he wants to anymore, never a straight face with everything so close to the surface. Every day he sets a new record for the worst he's ever felt. He's honestly not sure how much longer this can go on.

And so he breaks when Carol comes slinking back, every spiteful, ugly thought he's ever had spilling out to push her away for good. It's Carol's eyes first, this slow crumble, then her face, her tense mouth falling slack, her eyebrows bending down.

"Sophia wasn't my problem to fix, and I ain't yours!" It's snarled out, cruel and cut loose, and Daryl watches it sink deeper, dropping her shoulders into defeated slumps, rolling inward, caving around her chest.

There's a long, long time that's soundless and awful. There should be something, she should be walking away. But Carol's teary-eyed gaze is focused on him, exhaling slow and careful, not moving an inch.

"Are you done?" she asks, softly but in a way that makes Daryl feel smaller and even younger than he already is, and he gives up. He grabs his poncho from where it's crumpled on a log and slips it on, heads for the safety of his tent. He's curled up on his side when he hears Carol approach, and he stiffens, ready to spring up once provoked.

She stays outside, though, silhouette looming over him through the nylon as she speaks. "You did all you could for Sophia, and I'll still always be grateful for that. I won't presume to know you, or what you've been through. But nobody deserves to be alone, especially not you."

Daryl holds his breath as Carol flattens her hand against the side of the tent, spread wide and beckoning, until she finally leaves, and if he's cold now, it's only because the tent flap's been left open.

* * *

"Why did you decide to get these?"

"Hm?" Daryl is brought into focus by Hershel's voice, and he winces anew at the prickling sensation of thread being tugged from his skin. He twists his head around as much as possible to frown at the old man. "Get what?"

Hershel taps on the vicinity of Daryl's scapula. "Your tattoos," he clarifies before going back to cutting the stitches, and Daryl's left fumbling for a reply, because the only thing looping through his mind is _i kissed rick grimes in this room_.

He settles for shrugging his free shoulder and saying, "Just wanted 'em, I guess," because the truth is much less flattering than that. The Jesus-loving soul must be unnerved at having two devils staring at him from the expanse of Daryl's back while he works, and Daryl smirks at the thought.

One last snip and tug, and Hershel pulls away and declares him all fixed up. Daryl's barely off the bed when Jimmy comes in unannounced.

"Um, Beth's asking for you," he tells Hershel, but his gaze is scanning down Daryl's chest and fuck, half-naked right now, Jimmy's eyes a strange color once he raises them again. Daryl turns jerkily and picks up his shirt, vaguely listening in on Hershel's conversation with Jimmy. He realizes a bit late that he should have asked after Beth, given the man who's tended to his wounds at least the courtesy of being concerned for his family's wellbeing, but whatever.

Breathing easier now that he's got a layer of clothing between himself and what's left of the human populace, Daryl turns to find Jimmy still lingering by the doorway, still shadow-eyed and watching, or maybe Daryl's just being over imaginative again. He balls his hands into fists, scowling. "D'you mind?"

Jimmy jumps as if electrocuted, moves so Daryl can pass through. He doesn't knock his shoulder into the other boy's, though he comes pretty close.

Because Daryl really, really doesn't have the first clue what's going on in his head these days, off-balance and upset for some reason, his senses skewing around inside him. It's not just that he's never wanted another guy before, he's never wanted anyone ever, and sometimes he gets so angry at Glenn for kissing him, for fucking up his worldview.

But now there are also days when all Daryl cares about are blue eyes like a fucking kick to the head, times when all he can see are hands, shaded depressions between bone and the raised roughness of calluses. And the bumps of a spine outlined against a white T-shirt, small cups of ashy gray. And the long movement of forearm muscles and the sweep at the nape of a neck, an uneven fringe of dark curls rustling on a shirt collar. And the Cupid's bow in the bend of a soft pink smile. And now that he knows what it's like to kiss that smile, that mouth, sometimes it's all Daryl can think about.

He can't blame his wanting Rick on Glenn, not anymore.

Andrea has a few lucky weapons spread out before her, methodically stripping and cleaning a Mossberg when Daryl finds her inside the RV. She looks up when he slides the paperback she made him borrow across the table, a smile tweaking her face.

"You're right, it ain't that great," he tells her, biting back a grin of his own.

"Tell me about it." She gestures to a Browning auto with her toothbrush, then to the seat opposite her. "C'mon, it'll be our own unorthodox book club of two."

Daryl doesn't decline. Andrea's the only one aside from T-Dog whose company hasn't tested his nerves this past week, and he lets her bitch about the story, how it was written too predictably, doesn't talk about how he barely understood half the words he came across. The whole scene is disconcerting and incongruously normal, and he likes it, if he's honest with himself.

"Even the sex scenes felt more like a narration than the steamy things they should be," Andrea then says with a wink, and Daryl has to fight off an incriminating blush.

"Didn't know there was a. Y'know. A gay thing," he hears himself saying. Flapping his hand around uselessly for lack of a better way of expressing how he felt coming across the main character ending up with another man, and he'd lain in his tent for a long time waiting for the freaked-out shine to wear from it, for it to become weird or disgusting like it was supposed to be, but it never happened, and that mortified him more.

The amorphous cast of mirth on Andrea's face melts away to something that's half stymied affection, half a reflective sort of pain, the kind of thing you have to live six decades before being able to pull off. "Hey," she says. "There's nothing wrong with that, okay? You can't choose who you fall for. That's what the whole book's about."

A few minutes pass, totally silent but for the metallic snicks and shuffles of the guns. Daryl's mind skims shallowly, firearm specifics and the switchblade in his back pocket and Rick, thoughts of the man like a shadow play-background to everything, but he's not the only one, it seems.

"Do you approve of this?" Andrea asks, length of her shoulders stiff. "Rick's plan to let the prisoner go?"

Daryl likes the neutrality of his tone when he says, "However he thinks it should go."

Andrea sits back, rubs at her forehead like she's forgotten about the black grease on her hands. "Shane and I planned on leaving once, to fend for ourselves. We should've gone. We would've taken you with us."

Huh, Daryl thinks, and considers the possibility, plays out the train of thought to its hypothetical ends. Hike through the dark woods, follow moss, lie out in the open if the asphalt they follow is a dead end. Shane and Andrea would get on the hobby horse and forget to try and keep it secret from him, and they'd go the rest of their unforeseeable future pretending they never abandoned other people.

To his immense surprise, Daryl finds that he doesn't like that idea at all.

He wraps his fingers around the barrel, swallows hard. "Right" is all he says, and it's left at that.

* * *

As it turns out, Randall is a bigger problem than anticipated.

"We need to interrogate him." Rick's pissed at himself, it's obvious. Bruised under his clothes from his best friend's fists, cold flat look to his gaze, and Daryl shifts from one foot to the other, watches the early morning light leaking through the trees and over Rick's shoulders, tingeing the planes of his cheeks. Aloud he asks, "Y'think playin good cop bad cop'll work here?"

"No." Rick presses absently at the cut on the hinge of his jaw, winces. He must not have gotten a wink of sleep. "I don't know what Shane will do if he goes near that guy."

Daryl nods, mind already made up. "I'll do it, then."

Rick blinks, something in his expression flickering. "Daryl, you can't –"

"Shane can't. T and Glenn ain't got the stomach for it. And you ain't settin this kinda example for Carl."

Rick exhales, coarse like he's swallowed sand. Lines dig deeper around his mouth, worry carving him up, but that can't be right.

Daryl waits for a while, then turns away. "Don't let anyone near the shed."

His hands are a hammy mess once he's through, but he's got what he needs, and doled out a little righteous punishment too. That asshole narrating what happened to those girls like he thought Daryl would get off on something as sick as that – it made ruining his knuckles worth the trouble. He settles on a log a stone's throw away from the main camp to check the extent of the damage, and also because he can barely keep a grip on his crossbow.

"Yech," he sighs, eyebrows knotting at the thumbprints of blood decorating his skin, hurting a lot more now that he's looked at it. Stretching them doesn't feel any better, but he'd rather not cramp up.

"Did it hurt to punch the guy?"

Daryl looks up to find himself the subject of Carl's scrutiny, and smirks with a shake of his head. "I been hurt worse. You too, buddy."

Carl grins back, but his eyes are set on Daryl's crossbow, little-kid attention span still. "Can you teach me how to shoot that?" he asks.

"Your arm ain't long enough," Daryl huffs, though that's a shoddy excuse, he was younger than that when Jess started prodding him into the woods, arranging his coltish limbs to support the weight of a hundred-pound killing machine, and Carl hardly needs to learn that, he has father, a whole village of people to protect him from the cold.

Carl tries to wheedle his way into Daryl's favor a bit more, but Carol's making her way towards them, and Daryl swats him away. He accepts the ice pack offered to him, though he doesn't appreciate what follows.

"You get what you wanted? Thanks? Approval?" and it's almost like she's disappointed in him, weird twisting feeling in Daryl's gut and he grumbles, "That ain't what this is about."

"Then what?" Carol demands. "What are you trying to prove?"

Daryl makes a show of scoffing, turning away, and she sees right through it. "Don't act like you don't care," she says, wagging her finger in the air and it would be comical in any other situation. "You want your friendship back, take it. Every kind and smart thing you've said, take it all back. But don't sit back here and tend to your bloody fists and pretend you don't care about what happens to you."

It's not approval, Daryl thinks as he settles back onto his log, the bite of blessed cold to his aching joints not quite registering. It's the mileage Rick's gained, how he looks so tired all the time, and Shane's dark eyes, and Daryl doesn't have anything better to do.

This is what he tells himself, what he keeps telling himself. It's what he tells Dale, when the old man tries to convince him to save Randall.

"This group's broken," he says, and watches his words prove true later at sunset, an unraveling soap opera. He's never traveled with an ensemble like this, never had the chance to appreciate all the attendant drama, though it does mean someone's life or death.

And for all Shane's bluster of doing away with the threat, he stands a good two yards away from the whole scene after he blindfolds Randall. It's Rick who pulls his Python out, Daryl who shoves the blubbering guy to his knees. Rick's mouth is screwed tight and he doesn't look up at Daryl, but Daryl gets this bedrock feeling that Rick wants to.

Carl changes the whole ballgame.

Randall won't stop sobbing when Daryl frog marches him back to the shed. "Thank you," he whimpers to Daryl, even as rope is threaded around his hands so he can be strung up better. "Oh god thank you thank you thank you –"

Daryl stuffs a rag into Randall's mouth, tugs the dampened piece of black cloth around his eyes free. "Don't be grateful just yet," he growls, of half a mind to put a bullet through Randall's brain himself when the screams reach his ears.

He's never been the fastest runner; in local ragtag tournaments with the neighborhood kids he'd always end up straggling behind, a lit match under his lungs. But he reaches Dale first, buries his knife into the skeletal walker's skull. Dale's eyes slam back and forth between the treacle sky and Daryl, gasping with his innards exposed to the night air.

Rick's hand lost its steadiness since Carl told him to shoot an unarmed man, and he's never recovered, the length of his gun weaving like a boxer. Everyone's crying, almost, and Shane is hissing at Rick through his teeth, "c'mon, brother," but Rick doesn't do anything, can't. The events of the day have taken their toll.

And that's what moves Daryl to take the Python from Rick's limp hand, kneel before Dale. Good old Dale, so filled to the brim with idealistic hopes, the belief that Daryl's a better kid than everyone else has his pegged as, and for once Daryl lets him believe it.

"M'sorry," he says, but how Dale gathers the strength to crane his neck and press his forehead to the gun's barrel tells him to feel otherwise.

The shot echoes like a cannon.

Glenn's still sniffling when he returns in Shane's truck with a bed sheet to bundle Dale's body up in, and for once Daryl doesn't snap at him. This is the first time he's been alone with the guy since the CDC, but Daryl's had enough of confrontation for now.

"Thank you," Glenn says into the silence, as they're walking back to their respective camps. "You did what even Rick couldn't bear to do, so. Thank you."

Daryl squints at him sideways, the weak illumination from his lamp rendering him unable to decipher the look Glenn's wearing. He decides to take it at face value, murmurs, "You got the short end of the stick, man. Now you're stuck takin care o' that shitty RV."

It's probably not the best thing to say, but to everyone's surprise Glenn lets out a watery laugh, patting Daryl on the arm before going back to his girlfriend.

Dale is buried at first light, and Daryl joins the crew set to check the fences and take care of any roamers that made their way in. Andrea's full of rage, kicking at walker carcasses twice as viciously as the rest of them, and halfway through the task Daryl pulls her aside, forces her to take a drink of water. "Gotta slow down, woman, leave some for the rest of us," he says in jest, but Andrea remains stony-faced, and she sighs.

"I can't stop thinking about. What if I'd found him earlier, he would have known Randall's life was spared, he would be so happy –" She breaks off, deadpan, shaky as hell.

"Can't dwell on that," Daryl says, and hazards gently knocking his shoulder into hers. "C'mon, we're fallin behind."

Andrea doesn't respond the whole walk back to Shane and T-Dog, but Daryl doesn't think she's mad. It's not that kind of quiet.

Eventually she tells him, "you're right," and a marginal amount of stiffness falls out of her body. She makes the barest ghost of a smile, and Daryl knows she'll be alright.

It looks like Rick will be too, if his steadier eye and clearer plans are anything to go by. And there's something else.

"That thing you did last night." Rick never finishes his sentence, staring at the chipped white paint on the porch they're standing on, but Daryl understands.

"Ain't no reason you should do all the heavy liftin."

A fraught moment, Rick scanning Daryl's face and Daryl's mind is running triple-time, skyrocketing through possibilities. Heat rises up Daryl's neck, Rick's eyes focused and sharp and he feels it like something tangible. Daryl bites the inside of his lip, feeling a little crazy.

The Honda pulls up the driveway, Shane behind the wheel, and Rick unfolds and folds the map between his hands. "So you're good with all this?"

Daryl lifts one shoulder, unfamiliar rasp creeping into his tone as he says, "Don't see you an' I tradin haymakers on the side of the road. Nobody'd win that fight."

There's a pause, then a huffing noise of amusement. Rick's grateful, Daryl realizes. It's there in the softness of his tired eyes, the bend of his smile.

Daryl is so, so fucked.


	9. interlude ii: touch nothing you'll leave

The first time Shane got into a fistfight with Rick, they were twelve years old.

They were in the Grimeses' overgrown backyard and propped against a tree, the alligator skin bark scraping against their backs with each shift and slide. Rick was sniffing and wiping at his nose with the sleeve of his jacket, anger and humiliation warring on his face because Ned Crosby was the closest thing they had to a real bully, and he'd pushed Rick around at school again earlier, called him names.

Shane patted Rick's knee, ignored the leaf that drifted from the branch above them and caught in his hair. "You just gotta punch him next time, he'll leave you alone for sure," he said, reassuring.

Rick flushed and looked down, gnawing his lower lip to hell. "Ma says punching is bad. And –" His next words came out rushed, a confession. "And I don't know how."

"Well, you gotta know how," Shane insisted, nudging his foot at Rick's sneaker. "Sometimes…sometimes you fight, and you gotta know how." He stood, pulled his friend up with him. Rick was still hesitant, not understanding, and Shane waved him on in invitation. "Hit me," he said, and braced himself.

Rick blinked in shock. "Um." He raised his fists, but dropped them, feeling dumb. "I don't want to hit you. I wanna hit Ned Crosby."

"Then you pretend I'm him." Shane got on his tiptoes, mustered his best Neanderthal expression, and that got Rick to laugh, at least. Shane fell back on his heels, saying honestly, "Hit when I'll least expect it."

There was a second or two, Rick still skeptical, but eventually he widened his stance and right hooked Shane in the jaw lightning-fast, not as bad as Shane was expecting; Rick probably pulled back at the last possible moment.

"Ow!" Shane yelped, and Rick was already stammering apologies, his hands fluttering like moths around Shane's face, but Shane straightened up, shook his head sharply to clear it. "'Kay, my turn."

Rick swallowed, but took the drifting loop of a roundhouse punch with only a short, shocked cry, and he was grinning again.

"Cool!" he exclaimed, and punched Shane in the mouth.

The fight was fast and graceless, awkward twig arms and legs flying, testing their fists on each other's faces and ribs, copper in Shane's mouth, Rick's left eye squeezed shut. They ended up scrabbling on the candy wrapper leaves, rolling around and growling, coated in loose earth, finally breaking apart and lying on their backs beside each other, panting.

Shane tipped his head to the side, his smile red-stained. "That was pretty good, Ricky."

Rick worked his jaw open and closed, complained, "Tolja to stop calling me that. Only Ma can, and that's 'cause it's her job to embarrass me."

"Whatever," Shane laughed, and squinted at the sky, spearing his arm up. "That cloud looks kinda like a monkey," he said, and Rick shifted closer to see where he was pointing, knocking their hips together and he looked happy too.

Their brawls after that were due to drunken disagreements, mostly, and the one time at Shane's mother's wake when Shane decked Rick in front of the priest, and Rick had to retaliate before dragging him away, letting him break down in the privacy of the restrooms. Rick's hand a soft squeezing burn on the back of Shane's neck, blood on his lips and speckling his white button-down, nothing that Shane should remember quite so well.

Rick's never thrown the first punch in a fight, not since that autumn afternoon, always waiting for provocation. But he throws it now, here eighteen miles away from everything, and Shane knows how to parry that hook, knows how to fight dirty and bring Rick to the ground. No kid gloves on now: the goal is to hurt, and hurt in the worst way, even if it means ripping out something more fragile from Shane's chest.

_i didn't look at her before that, if i could take it all back, i would_, he's already pleaded, but Rick doesn't let him finish. Rick doesn't listen to him anymore.

"You gotta follow my lead, you gotta trust me," he says, though his eyes clearly say that he can't trust Shane anymore. And the longer Shane looks at Rick a thousand more images flicker through his mind, superimposing themselves over Rick's grim face, seeing him twenty years younger, seeing him blinded by pain and wild with despair, seeing him exhausted, seeing him happy, seeing everything; Shane sees everything.

Therein lays the crux of the matter.

Broad daylight in front everyone and Daryl can't stop glancing at Rick, slicing little looks with the corner of his mouth crimped up, and what's worse is that Rick is glancing back, like he can't help it. It makes a slow red haze fall across Shane's vision, not all anger, but something else that's just as familiar and twice as tragic.

"You wanna take the teenager as your wingman, be my guest." A sneer, perfectly formed, bitter-tasting, and Rick has the gall to bare his teeth at that in a parody of a smile, reply with "thank you," mocking Shane and not bothering to hide it.

Rick may not hold him in high regard anymore, but Carl and Lori do, though it's nothing like before, and this black corrosive thing happens to Shane's insides, watching everything he holds dear drift away from him, create different paths to orbit around a different sun. And somehow.

Somehow, lost and desperate and overcome with inarticulate rage, Shane wanders back towards the cliff he first found when he was fifteen, sheer and no-man-fathomed, and this time he throws himself off it.

"So this is where you plan to do it?" Rick asks. His back is turned to Shane, the line of his shoulders ramrod stiff as he slowly slips his piece back into his holster. Already giving up.

Shane gives up all pretense, cocks his gun. "It's a good place as any," he says, and it's true. The full moon is huge, taking up half the sky, wide flat field unobscured by trees and no way to hide.

"Why? Why now? I thought we worked this all out." Rick looks broken when he circles back around, and Shane thinks viciously, _good_.

"We tried to kill each other, man, what you think? We just gonna forget about it all, ride off into the sunset together?"

"I could've left you," Rick says, his mouth twisting up like he wants to cry. "At that station, I could've left you for dead like you did Otis, but I didn't. You're my best friend. You won't be able to live with this."

Shane's struck dumb by that for a moment before he starts screaming. "What you know about what I can live with? You got no idea what I can live with, what I _live_ with," and Shane's thinking about Rick at fifteen and shaving without a shirt on, his back smooth as glass and the new dark on his face, his proud grin.

"Raise your gun, raise your goddamn gun," he yells as he lowers his own, and behind Shane's eyes Rick is talking about how his first date with Lori went, Shane witnessing for the first time how Rick Grimes looks when he's so in love he can't think straight.

"No." Rick's expression has grown taut and fierce, but his eyes are haunted. "No, I will not."

There's so much Shane can say, so much he wants to say. _it was supposed to be us against the world, and you left me and i didn't know what to do_, he wants to say. _lori and carl, they gave me a purpose, a reason to keep going, and just when i thought i could finally live with myself you came back, told me i can't love lori or carl or my baby, replaced me with that faggot hick boy, and if i kill you i get everything back._

_i love you, you're my best friend, i love you enough to kill you._

But Shane doesn't. Shane never will. Other things come crashing out, other firebright hurtful things, and Rick suffers the abuse without further protest, the only sign of life from him his breath condensing in the night air. Even at gunpoint he's unfazed, holding his piece out to Shane, advancing step by careful step, his voice a beacon. There is still a way back from this, Rick promises, and as the Python rests in Shane's hand Shane finds it in himself to smile.

"Ricky," he starts to say when the knife is plunged into his heart.

Shane didn't expect that. He thinks absurdly: i've taught him well.

Rick catches his domino-topple forwards, brings him to rest against the mildewed grass. "Damn you for making me do this, Shane," he's sobbing, awful gutshot sound, everything moving very slowly and the world coming to an end one more time. "You did this to us, this was you, not me, not me."

The moon is behind Rick and all that's visible of him are his cutout cheekbones, the red that's Shane's trembling fingers have smudged on his mouth, and once again Shane is not prepared for how beautiful his best friend is with blood on his face.

* * *

**went overboard with the backstories but whatever. last-ditch effort to love shane, like the show's last-ditch efforts to make fans sympathize with him in the remaining episodes of his life. ah well.**

**totally ripped off the 'i love you enough to kill you' line from penny dreadful, which y'all should watch, despite the heartbreakingly disappointing finale.**

**oh jesus you guys this next chapter, my tiny lizard brain, it refuses to be denied. just one word about it: voyeurism. *runs far far away***


	10. ink only gives shape to the dark

Four in the morning and Rick wakes up to random bursts of soft clattering, his eyes still pasted shut. His hand is on the hilt of the knife under his jacket-turned-pillow, and after two seconds his brain provides him with _not a walker_.

He forces his eyes open and there's enough sick grayish light for Rick to see Daryl stepping carefully towards the window, crossbow raised. The source of the noise is a chicken, of all things, tapping on the sill like a traveling salesman, and Daryl shoots it down through the jagged grin of broken glass panes.

"Hello, breakfast," he murmurs, a boyishness to his smile that's incredibly rare even considering the fact that no one's had reason to smile since the farm three weeks ago. Rick continues to play possum, watching Daryl jimmy one leg at a time through the window to retrieve his kill then slouch against the wall, making brown feathers rain down on the scuffed linoleum.

Rick chooses to sit up then, stretch out while fighting the urge to yawn, and Daryl visibly pauses before he continues plucking at the chicken. "Okay?" he asks, and Rick has to scan the rest of the living room, take inventory of where Lori and Carl are curled up together on the ratty couch before nodding. "Looks like you got busy."

"Nah, this thing was practically giftwrapped." Daryl's voice is only barely smug, withered and sere by the early hour, and Rick suddenly realizes he was supposed to take watch a while ago.

"You didn't wake me for my shift?"

Daryl shrugs with one shoulder. "Told you it wasn't a problem." He's talking untidily, slower than usual, 'tolja' instead of 'told you,' softening 'problem' so that it rhymes with 'solemn,' and it's like Rick is underwater.

"I told you not to push yourself," he says, as stern as he can manage right now. "You don't have to do that. Now try and get some sleep."

Daryl doesn't argue, crumpling in on himself like a wet sheet, shadows under his eyes, his poncho wrinkled. He looks godawful, and Rick is not pleased with himself. He gets to his feet and twists to crack his back, wincing at the muted firecracker pops. He pulls on his jacket and checks his spare gun, now outfitted with a suppressor made of Maglite, ready to step outside when he remembers.

He goes to pick up the chicken, its bald spots glowing in the half-light, and stooped over he sees Daryl's eyes are still open, dissecting Rick, it feels like.

"Sleep," he tells Daryl, one last gentle rebuke. "I'll finish plucking this." He doesn't wait for any form of reply and steps out into the cold, braced and ready to suffer the day.

* * *

The last stretch of summer and it feels like the sun is making up for all the months when it won't shine, a pounding hundred and seven degrees outside, vicious and white splashed across the sky. Rick studies the wall of the Laundromat they're currently holed up in, a tea-colored stain of dubious origin stark against the green paint and shaped like a dark country. He's sorely tempted to whip off his shirt and careen into the reservoir ten miles away, but T-Dog's still weakened, Beth coughing like an early warning neon sign, so for now they're stuck here.

They had to bring Carl on a supply run when T-Dog's fever spiked alarmingly, and Lori hasn't said a word to Rick for thirty hours straight. He's been keeping count.

(– see, compound that with the fact that before they left, Carl brought himself into his parents' cold war with a bang, a watch wound too tight for far too long, his voice climbing above theirs and Carol had to plead with them to keep it down. The heart of the matter boiled down to Carl spitting, "I _knew_ about you and Shane, Mom, and I'm sick of you treating me like a clueless little kid, treating Dad like he's the worst person in the world, I'm fucking _sick_ of it," and Lori going deathly pale, trying to say something but failing, whole packs of words disintegrating just like that. Rick didn't think to rebuke Carl for cursing, not then, too busy watching his wife break before his eyes. And so.)

The back door to the Laundromat brangs open and shut, footsteps crunching across the dirt to the other side of the building where Rick knows is Daryl's self-proclaimed smoking area.

Rick would ignore it, go about keeping an eye on the perimeter as usual, but then, audible enough from where Rick's standing:

"You gotta let me try, Daryl, c'mon."

Rick's not thinking anything in particular, as he inches along the wall so he's opposite, but hidden, from his son and Daryl. He's just hoping Carl's not talking about what Rick thinks he might be.

"Fine." Daryl, low and careful and smolder-rough, followed by the click of a lighter. "But you better quit buggin me after this."

"Yeahyeahyeah." Carl's barely listening, too excited by the novelty of what he's about to do, and Rick briefly entertains the futile hope that he's asleep and dreaming.

But then there's the rushing sound of Carl's deep inhale, and a cacophony of coughs too vivid even for Rick's markedly twisted conscious. "Eww!" It's hissed out, Carl's voice in tatters, and Rick doesn't hold back his grin. Like father, like son. "Why do you even like this stuff?"

Daryl laughs, sudden and disarming, catching Rick aback like a missed step, a stumble on flat ground. "'Cause I'm addicted, smartass. Won't be able to quit it any more'n you can hold your breath forever."

"Well, I don't like it."

"Good. Means you stay away from this shit."

It's a clever move on Daryl's part, to let Carl discover smoking for himself, let him decide how to feel about it. Thankfully, Carl's reacted to it the same way he reacted to alcohol back at the CDC.

Shane, though. Shane would have laughed, instructed softly "you gotta do it slow, hold it in then let it out slow," he would've stayed with his head tucked close to Carl's until twin spirals of idyllic smoke wafted from the both of them, just like how he taught Rick a lifetime ago.

Rick rubs his face hard, digging his fingers into his eyes just enough for blurry spots to shatter across his vision, red and white. Another of the world's greatest cosmic jokes, to have most of everything he knows tie back to his best friend one way or another. Abandoned gas stations remind him of Shane, as do battered license plates with the color all rubbed away to a dull silver, the smudged white cards of drive-in movie screens. Green walls remind him of Shane. His own goddamn hands remind him of Shane.

He killed his best friend because it was the easy way out. He has a bunch of different ways to explain it, all kinds of rationalizations about danger and potential in this new real world, but at the end of the day, it was cowardice, that was all. He'll never let himself forget that, never forgive himself for it.

But he doesn't regret it. Having his son with him now, and emulating someone good, someone like Daryl – he won't give that up for anything.

"Rick?"

Lori, standing quietly by the window, her hand over the barely visible swell of her belly, and Rick squeezes his eyes shut, welcoming the dull prodding pain, the fresh break in his heart, tells his wife, "I'm fine."

* * *

Nothing's ever going to go like it's supposed to, Rick has to remind himself.

They're in a halfway cleared out supermarket, trying not to flinch too hard at how Maggie is moaning without end, low uneven thrum of sound as her foot swings sick and oiled at the end of her broken ankle. She's in constant motion, this slow excruciating wave, long shudders and her fists digging into Glenn's chest.

"Let's get her lying down," Hershel says, his face carved heavy, and it ends with Maggie's head pillowed on Glenn's lap, her hands tight around Glenn's biceps.

"_Hurts_, fuck it hurts," she hisses, teeth bared in the dark.

Glenn can only hush her and push her hair out of her eyes, utterly miserable, Beth coming to join him and grip her sister's hand.

Rick watches Hershel tending to Maggie, cutting the boot off her swollen foot and slitting her jeans to the knee. Maggie's head is rolling back, slow pendulum with her face in a rictus. Rick tries to focus. "What do you need?" he asks.

"It's a clean break so plaster, even modeling plaster will do," Hershel says, only looking up once from his work. "And splints and whatever kind of cloth we can spare to cut up."

"I think I saw an arts and crafts section when we came in," Carl says, Carol adding, "We can use bed sheets," and they both take off in between aisles, and Rick's not comfortable with having anyone out of his sight right now.

T-Dog comes up to him, a hand landing on Rick's arm, immediate and inarguable. "Hey, that wall collapsed on you too, y'know," he says, pulling him to sit on the dirty floor, and Rick goes willingly enough.

Back when they were half-covered in rubble and there were gnashing walkers surrounding them, Rick feared a chunk of his flesh had been torn free along with his shirt. But the pain in his shoulder has by now dulled to a bone-jarring throb, nauseating but not fatal. He's worried about Glenn, who's sitting stiffly upright and grimacing each time he breathes. And Maggie, her foot and ankle so swollen and discolored they look fake, bruises rising on her face, stealing most of the sweetness from her features.

"I screwed up," Rick hears himself saying, and something yanks sideways and then it's coming out of him in a flood. "I thought for sure we'd still have time, a herd that size couldn't possibly knock the place down, but it did, it fucking _fell_ –"

"Hey." T-Dog's voice is uncharacteristically severe and Rick's spine snaps, his teeth clicking together. He can't look at anyone, not Beth, not Lori huddled uncertainly in the corner. Not Daryl, taking stock of his remaining arrows across them and pretending not to listen in.

"You got 'em out," T-Dog continues. "You got back to us and got us away in time. You did what you could, man." He laughs abruptly, rubbing at his chin as if recalling a distant memory. "Y'know, when Carl got shot, when all that shit happened, I got a fever, got delirious. Told Dale that for sure you guys had left us behind to die. But you proved me wrong. You always been proving me wrong, Rick. You never leave people behind. You're a good man."

Rick just blinks, exhausted and not capable of much more, but grateful, and T-Dog's answering grin is clear enough despite the dimness.

Lori comes near, says quietly, "Let me take a look at that," and Rick's too quick to reply, "I'm fine," his tone too harsh. She flinches, shrinks back, and Rick wonders with a vague secondhand sheen of pain, when did she start seeking him out and he start to pull away?

Daryl chooses that moment to stand, snapping the tension. "They oughta have some painkillers around here," he announces to no one in particular, and leaves, but not before flicking an unreadable look at Rick, mouth set in a grim line.

Maggie's cast is made of whittled broom handles and strips of bedsheet and uneven plaster. It's dried by the time she wakes up from her first Demerol-induced coma, and Carl gets her a whole set of colored pens for decorative purposes. Maggie insists that everyone take turns signing it, and Rick likes to think that it's not just because she's doped to the gills that she's this jovial.

"I'ma draw a dirty picture," Daryl says after Carl's done scribbling a yellow facsimile of his sheriff's hat, hunched over Maggie's leg with a sly little grin.

"Oh my god, don't you dare," Maggie cries out, trying to sit up and grab the marker from Daryl's hand, but he sways away rattlesnake-quick, still grinning.

"Was just kiddin, jesus, now stay still or break your ankle again."

Rick chuckles, smiling against his will, and goes back to fashioning the suppressor for Carl's gun, made out of the end of an aluminum bat, this time. It's Maggie's soft gasp that snags his attention again, and Rick looks up in time to see the color that travels up Daryl's neck and flushes his face when she says "Goodness, it's beautiful." He never does well with compliments, it seems.

Later, when it's his turn to sign the cast, Rick asks Maggie which one Daryl did, though it's merely by rote. Among the hastily done flowers and stick figures and names, only one clearly had time and effort put into it. The bird of prey, a falcon, maybe, is as big as the palm of Rick's hand, intricate and so very lifelike, despite the green ink. Underneath it Daryl has signed in blocky print, _4 the strongest_.

Rick smiles, his chest suddenly unobstructed and rushing full. In the gap between Glenn's cartoony hearts and Carol's Bible verse, he writes a quiet _I'm glad you're healing_, and Maggie reads it with her lips moving noiselessly, her fingers stroking the words.

"Thank you," she says, and Rick knows she's not just talking about designing her cast.

Rick closes his hand around hers, thinking of powerful wings arcing high into the sky.

* * *

And then things go bad for real this time.

Georgia climate was never one for doing things halfway. When it shines, the sun bakes you from outside in. When it rains, the downpour soaks the black highway until it looks like glass in the headlights and it's too dangerous to keep driving.

Rick pulls the car over after they almost skid twice, looks at Daryl. "We might as well sleep while we can, get moving again once it's cleared some."

They both know better than to find a building in this deluge, as most of them will be occupied by now. Walkers don't like rain, either, and Rick has seen firsthand how they're stripped right down to the bone by wind and water, half-congealed masses on the ground. And the food and supplies they've gathered are safe and dry in the trunk anyway.

Daryl nods, arms crossed so he doesn't jitter that noticeably. "You get the backseat."

"You take it. I'll take shotgun. I'll feel better sitting up."

It takes some awkward maneuvering on Daryl's part, but eventually they get comfortable, and Rick says, "Goodnight, Daryl," feeling a little stupid only afterwards.

Some indeterminable time later, Rick comes awake again as if he's been kicked in the head, blinking slowly at his surroundings and taking in the fact that the skies have cleared, leaving pale clouds in formations like ribs across the unmarred black expanse. He keeps having the disconcerting feeling that he's gone deaf, so used to having the steady clatter of raindrops against the metal of their car.

Rick peers around his seat, sees Daryl as a long poncho-covered lump, thatch of messy hair sticking out the top. By his watch, they've slept for three hours, and Rick should probably wake Daryl up so they can get going again, but he takes pity. This is the first time the teen's slept this good in months.

Daryl coughs and rolls over so that Rick can see the top half of his face, shallow lines pulled across Daryl's forehead, and Rick has the strange thought that someday the lines would be permanent; someday Daryl would be old. If he ever even reached that point.

But Rick knows he will. He stretches his arms out and sighs as silently as he can, eyes unfocused in Daryl's general direction. As terrible as it sounds, Daryl was built for this frightening world, this incredibly specific existence that no one else could hope to understand. But he's found family in the unlikeliest places, with Carol, and T-Dog, and hopefully the rest of them. They've already survived so much together.

Daryl starts to snuffle and kick, and Rick lets his vision solidify again. He watches Daryl shove his poncho up, his sleeping face pinched in a completely typical expression of frustration. Daryl's sixteen and most things piss him off. Right now it's the poncho, too hot maybe or too constricting, either way Daryl squirms until he's half free. His long legs keep pressing out, trying to stretch.

Rick studies Daryl, his eyes adjusting slowly to the dark, and he's stuck for some reason on the line of Daryl's neck as he rolls his head. Daryl's biting his lip, making these crooked little sounds, cut off in the back of his throat, and he keeps tipping up, pushing at the air. He has this crazy striving look all muddied by sleep, vague and desperate in the bend of his eyebrows and his abused lower lip.

Daryl huffs out a breath, and Rick realizes all of a sudden what kind of dream he's having. His eyes dart down instinctively and he sees that Daryl has a hand pressed against himself, the line of muscle in his forearm tensing and giving.

Rick hisses between his teeth. It's the surprise, that's all, one of a million startling sights revealed when you don't make a habit of knocking on doors.

He twists back around in his seat, but Rick can still hear Daryl shifting and making small uncomfortable noises, the rasp of his boots against the car door. Rick's not going to look back over there because it's just. Wrong.

Not that he's never been in this situation before. There's an etiquette to it, ritual known to brothers and best friends and teenagers in summer camp cabins, and Rick followed it religiously when he was young. Turned away on your side, blanket pulled up above your elbow, back hunched, muffled and quick with your lip bitten to keep the sounds in. A perfunctory apology in the bow of your head, the tight skin at the back of your neck, sorry bro you know how it is. Rick can't fault Daryl for this.

But that was different. This car is an enclosed space, and not all that capacious to begin with. Daryl is maybe two feet away, probably less, angled towards Rick and rocking and gasping with that maddening look on his face, and there's not enough fucking air in here.

So Rick is watching him again. It's mesmerizing, this piece of Daryl that for all their time together he's never stumbled across before. Daryl rolls his head slow, throat stretched out pale and sapling smooth. He's sweating and his hair is getting darker, stuck in cowlicks against his forehead. Exhaling faint and ragged, teeth dented into his lower lip, rubbing distractedly at himself, Daryl looks so upset. He looks desperate.

"Rick."

Rick almost jumps out of his skin, his eyes guiltily darting back up to Daryl's and expecting to see them open and mortified, a what-the-hell look to them. But they're closed still, shut so tight, and Rick thinks foggily that that's odd.

Until Daryl, still dreaming, parts his lips and moans Rick's name for a second time, and the sound crashes like a klaxon in Rick's mind. The kiss back at the farm, Daryl's cryptic words, every breathless moment between the two of them, it has all telescoped to _this_.

And instead of it feeling like a bucketful of cold water, it's a molten throb low in his stomach, blistering its way up, and Rick presses his fingers to his cheek, picturing the pale marks fading, filling in.

What would happen if Rick were to reach across the space between them and twine his hand with Daryl's, or maybe push it out of the way? What if Rick were to clamber atop Daryl, learn the feel of his overheated skin, lick at the sheen that's gathered in the hollow under his jaw? Would Daryl's whole body cant into Rick's before he even gained consciousness, would he gasp at the sight and beg for more? Would Daryl let Rick put his mouth on those cuts of skin visible at Daryl's hips, lowlowlow on his stomach, until he came under Rick's hand?

Daryl groans, loud and long enough to signify his completion, and Rick keeps trying to swallow but it's like his throat is broken, panting open-mouthed and hard himself, hard enough that his dick is straining painfully against his fly. He can't pretty this up, can't hide it from himself, too smart for that kind of thing.

He wants Daryl. A teenager. Who wants him right the fuck back.

Rick keeps getting stuck on the worst parts, the part where he's just intruded on a juvenile getting off, the part where he's all but pissed on his pregnant wife, the part where he deserves to be shot in the street like a dog, and that easily transforms the arousal into utter mortification. He curls all the way onto his other side, distantly hysterical. He's breathing too hard. It echoes, bounces off the cold wall of the doorframe where Rick has his face pressed, sucking hard on the inside of his lip.

Daryl isn't making any noise anymore, and Rick counts his breaths, well into triple digits when he hears Daryl snore, rusty throat-clearing snuffle that fades to nothing once Daryl gets deeper asleep. Rick peeks over his shoulder, and Daryl's eyes are caught in shadow and cupped perfect like shells. His face is all smoothed out, his hands loose on his stomach.

Rick turns back to the car door, pressing his face to the window and picturing what it would look like from the outside, hollow-eyed and anonymous and foreboding.

He doesn't go back to sleep again.

* * *

Daryl wakes him before dawn, and Rick lets him drive, something that surprises Daryl immensely, secret irrepressible smile working at the corners of his mouth, and Rick has to school himself into looking away. The car gives a sickening lurch every first few feet, and Daryl says sheepishly, "sorry, kinda forgot how to do this."

The ride gets smoother after a while, and Daryl's fingers are drumming on the steering wheel, keeping time to a beat only he can hear. The sky has watered and faded lavender to pink, and the sun is just starting to spear over the horizon. Rick stares into the opening highway and thinks on a loop, _far far away far far away_, believing on a fundamental level that anything can be outrun, anything can be killed. Rick doesn't have to accept being like this; he can fight it.

"When d'you think it'll start snowing?"

Rick freezes in his seat for a moment, hearing something else in his head before the rest of him catches up. "Can't tell," he decides to say after a while, his voice normal enough. "Maybe not for a while yet."

"Always snowed as early as November, up in Blue Ridge," Daryl says, his eyes far away. "My uncle Jess would get us eggnog even if it weren't Christmas yet. Drunk of our asses almost every day 'til the snow melts."

Rarely does Daryl talk about his life before the Turn, not without some gentle prodding at least, and Rick doesn't know what to do with this information, other than cherish it the way a magpie cherishes its trinkets, hiding it away from prying eyes. "Your uncle sounds like quite the character."

"Yeah, he was." Daryl half-smiles, as much as he ever does, and Rick can feel the sickness in him deepening, metastasizing, a cancer of the heart. He wants to cut it from his body, carve out the whole fucking thing.

"If I even so much as smell eggnog, I throw up."

Daryl's eyebrows quirk up, his amusement audible when he remarks, "Shit, I'm almost scared to ask."

Rick grins, razor sharp. "A souvenir from my second year at the academy. And yes, don't ask."

Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror and it's too simplistic, like a riddle with a hidden catch, and Rick doesn't trust it. He can't trust himself around Daryl anymore.

But he can do this. Rick can be what his family needs and what Daryl needs, the father and friend they both deserve. Rick can be a soldier worthy of demons, the glue that holds their group together, all the right things because that's his job, what he's meant for. He wants to be exactly this fucked up and no further, find some kind of peace in his tragic flaws.

"Okay?" Daryl asks, and Rick says yeah without looking at him, keeping his eyes trained on the road.


	11. november in summer

T-Dog calls for him to get his punk ass some dinner, and Daryl flips him off, only half certain that the shape of the insult will be visible enough from where T's standing. The other man's snorting laughter tells him that he hears the message loud and clear.

And so Daryl stays where he is, pacing the length of the overturned bus, crossbow at the ready. Treacherous elation is still crackling through him, making his mind pliable to romanticized thoughts. Low-hanging summer's moon with a bite taken out of it, casting the world in more light than shadow, walkers gurgling at him from behind wire fences, and it's a beautiful night.

When they first came across the overrun prison he thought Rick had lost it, staring so intently at the place like he was, crazy schemes ricocheting in his skull. Daryl already knew what Rick was going to say by the time he came back to himself, and he already knew what his answer would be. And now here they are, necessity being the mother of innovation and all that shit. Fate is finally being good to them.

At some point Daryl becomes aware of someone approaching him from the bonfire, and he turns around to watch Carol make her way to him, brandishing a bowl like Excalibur. "It's not much, but if I don't bring you something, you won't eat at all," she chides him, and he snorts.

"Guess lil Shane over there's got quite the appetite," he mutters, foot-in-mouth disease at work again, and Carol rightly glares at him for that.

"Don't be mean. Rick's gotten us a lot farther than I ever thought he would, I'll give him that." She pauses, then adds as an afterthought, "Shane could never have done that."

That line of reasoning doesn't make sense in correlation with the baby residing between Lori's sparrow-thin bones, but Daryl understands all the same. Carol doesn't hold Rick in the same regard anymore; that's changed, as much as she's had to, as they've all had to. _I_ became _we_, _me_ became _us_, in the same manner that the fresh green of spring crept in after snowmelt: slowly, barely noticeable unless you stopped to look for it, dwell on it. Thousands of miles of dirt roads and abandoned houses and near-deaths have melded this motley group together better than years of acquaintanceship ever could.

Daryl wishes more than almost anything that he could still leave them behind.

"You okay?" he asks, hardly chewing his owl, fixated on the rigidity of Carol's back.

She sighs, flexes her shoulders with a wince. "It's that rifle, the kickback? I'm just not used to it."

The impromptu massage has Carol smiling at him again, at least, and Daryl's dangerously close to smiling back as he says, "Better get back, Grandma."

Carol lets out an indignant, high pitched "Grandma?" and that's all it takes. Daryl flashes his biggest cheese-eating grin, the one just begging for a kick to the nuts.

"You got the aches n' pains for it. Hair, too."

But he only gets a light thwap on his arm and a theatrical scoff, and Daryl's still lighthearted when they join the others. Beth's voice carries in the air, sweet bell-like tone mingling with Maggie's lower register, and it finally pulls Rick back from his aimless circling around the perimeter. He takes just a mouthful of his food and gives the rest to Lori, eyes thin and trained on the flames, something frightful and stony tightening his expression, and Daryl's good mood wanes.

It's difficult to escape her little sobs, later.

Daryl rolls onto his side, ignoring the fatigue creeping up his leg and settling in his hip, the curve of his ribs. Carl is on his stomach, hat still resting against his head so Daryl can't see his face, can't tell if he's truly dead asleep or blocking out his mom, something he's been getting way too good at.

So he gets to his feet and pads over to where Lori lies, body angled like she wants to curl in on herself but can't because her belly's in the way. She immediately starts sniffling and wiping at her cheeks once she sees who it is. "Did I wake you?" she whispers, her eyebrows pulled down. She looks so exhausted, so defeated.

Daryl doesn't answer, choosing instead to tug his poncho off and drape it haphazardly over her. He has to kneel down to do it, shushing Lori's weak protests all the while.

"You got two people to keep warm," he reasons, and she gives him a worn smile, already pulling at the poncho and fixing it the way she likes. Daryl's about to stand, not needing to hear a thank you, when Lori catches him by the wrist.

Daryl risks a look at her face and her lips are pressed tight together, her eyes wide and searching. He doesn't know what to make of it. "You and Rick, you keep sacrificing the most," she says at length. "But we have this place now. You won't have to do this anymore."

Something seems to crumple then, and Lori shakes her head. "Such good men, the both of you," she tells him, a wrenched-free note in her voice piercing Daryl worse than any bullet.

He pats her hand once, twice, to get Lori to set him free and as he stands he can see Rick, gone completely still by the nearest guard tower. Daryl lets out a sharp breath, growing restless even though he knows he's done nothing wrong. He goes back to his bedspread rubbing his forearms together like sticks for a fire, slowly freezing to death. Daryl slips into his jacket and sinks back down, watching Rick watching him.

It's a long time before Rick turns away, before Daryl finds sleep again.

* * *

But four days later nothing's right.

For far too long the threats they faced were only walkers and Daryl's forgotten how vicious, how much worse other people can be. And maybe if he had been more vigilant, maybe if he hadn't hesitated to shoot Andrew then and there, maybe he could have –

Daryl rips all trains of thought running in that direction out of his mind like wet newspaper, but T-Dog's corpse is still stripped down to the bone behind his retinas, Carol's bandana a heavy weight in his back pocket.

And then Maggie and Carl and a squalling newborn emerge, all covered in Lori's blood, and Rick collapses on himself like a dying star.

Daryl has to look away, a lump building in his throat. It's too much, a blinding overexposure, the baby's cries and Rick's keening moans forming the most plaintive threnody Daryl never wanted to have to hear. Carl's standing stiffly by himself, not wanting to fall apart in public as well, but even the wide brim of his hat can't hide the clear rivers of grief etched between the grime on his cheeks, and a traitorous snarl emerges from the stunned doom that has fogged Daryl's senses, a sinister hiss that happens again, and again, and again.

_all your fault._

It's when Rick's sounds peter into whimpers, then sobs, and then nothing at all, that Daryl is spurred to worried alertness.

Rick's gaze has gone limpid and unseeing as he rolls to his knees, a disquieting looseness about his mouth. Daryl waves his hand about his face, tries to bring him back. "Rick, you with me? Rick."

Rick's wet eyes fasten onto his, and Daryl doesn't quite succeed in repressing a shudder from the implacable emptiness there.

Hershel, three limbs and all, is the first to think of taking control of the situation. "Let me see the baby," Daryl hears him say, and he has to force himself away from Rick, though he feels something like lightning snap in his chest while he does.

"We gotta feed it. We got anything a baby can eat?"

It doesn't look anything like a baby yet, red and sparse-haired and scrunched-up, and it's the most amazing thing Daryl's ever seen. Hershel pronounces, "The good news is she looks healthy," and Daryl finds himself fiercely latching on to that, _a girl, rick's baby is a girl_. "But she needs formula. And soon, or she won't survive."

There's no room in Daryl for fretting, and he growls out a terse, "No, no way. Not her. We ain't losin nobody else."

He's asking Beth to look out for Carl and Rick gets it into his head to grab the machete lying on the ground, storming back inside the cell block without sparing a glance for his children. Daryl's heart seizes up with fear, but he stomps it down with all the severity he can muster. "C'mon, we're gonna lose the light!"

Only Maggie ends up accompanying him on the hunt for baby supplies, and he approves of the way she leans naturally into the curves, soft and right, so that Daryl can almost forget her weight behind him on the Bonnie. He even forgives the uncomfortably tight grip of her hands around his waist. This girl's made of sterner stuff, same as her daddy and sister, having the fortitude to sacrifice Lori to spare the baby, and his already sizeable respect for her grows.

Daryl didn't expect her to be so sneaky, though.

"You like Rick, don't you?"

They're sitting on the floor of the daycare center feasting on granola bars, and Daryl narrowly misses choking on his next bite, his skeleton rattled by such an out-of-the-blue question. "The hell d'you mean?" he decides to reply, glad that there's no readable inflection in his voice at all, hoping to buy himself some time by playing dumb.

"You know exactly how I mean it." Maggie's gaze is steady, determined, and Daryl can't look at her a second longer; it feels like ice is crumbling inside him, a million tiny freezing points of panic. "Who – who told you that," he says to his lap, weak and pitiful and everything he doesn't want to be.

Maggie makes a low sound, a settling hum that hides no accusations, no suspicion or contempt. There's nothing like judgment in it, but it doesn't settle Daryl in the slightest. "It's not the kind of thing that needs to be said, really."

He bites the inside of his cheek, blood gathering beneath his skin in an appalling flush. Maggie's a Bible-thumper's daughter after all, and she must have sniffed it out of him, the _bend_ in his way of thinking, and it's never enough to really hide. "I'm not –" and the words away wither to nothing, though he doesn't even know what words they would have been.

"Daryl, hey." The sympathy is so audible it should be maddening, and Daryl affixes a scowl but Maggie's still smiling at him, small and fond in the way of elder siblings. "It's okay. Really."

Daryl huffs and crosses his legs Indian style for lack of something to do. "You're one to talk," he snarks, trying to get the ball back in his court. "Glenn kissed me once, y'know."

Surprise hikes Maggie's eyebrows, though Daryl can tell she's more tickled than pissed off by this shiny new grain of information. "Really."

"Yeah. He was shitfaced drunk when he did it, doesn't remember a thing but he scarred me for life."

Maggie utters something close to a laugh, and it should be macabre that the both of them can find it in themselves to be merry just hours after a third of their group was wiped out. It doesn't last for long, of course, and Daryl's nearly dizzy from all these slingshotting feelings he has no control over.

Maggie gets to her feet first, wiping her fingers on her jeans before offering her hand. "I won't tell if you won't," she says, and Daryl smirks, and lets her pull him up.

* * *

Daryl doesn't approve of the list of names Carl rattles off. Bad history attached to each one, and he wouldn't want anyone looking at this newfound spear of sunlight and finding a ghost. And so he names the baby himself.

"Y'like that? Huh, Lil Asskicker?"

Judging by the hard bright grins springing into existence on everyone's faces, it's a good name. Daryl holds her a while longer, rocking her back and forth and murmuring nonsensical endearments until she's drained her bottle and is yawning at him, wide and cavernous with a tiny slip of pink tongue peeking out.

Barely a day old and this girl's got Daryl wrapped snug around her little finger already. He doesn't know if that should worry him yet.

"You sure know your way around babies," Oscar says as he returns Lil Asskicker to her brother's arms. "Where'd you learn that?"

Daryl glances at the ex-convict right as Oscar's shoulder twitches like he'd intended to reach out and touch the baby, but thought better of it. Daryl remembers him mentioning kids when they first met, and is encouraged to share what he says next.

"We were holed up with this lady once, before all this," and Oscar blinks at him like he didn't expect an answer, Daryl lifting one corner of his mouth wryly at that. "She had a kid, let us stay over for free long as I took care of him. So I had to learn a thing or two."

He definitely did. Stella Mattias barely cleared five feet and wouldn't have broken a hundred pounds in steel-toed boots, but she was still a force to be reckoned with. She ran all the meth deals in that town, and that hardly left her enough time to take care of Jamie. She and Merle would be gone for days at a time, leaving Daryl and Jamie to their own devices, but they were alright as long as Dora the Explorer was on TV.

Daryl doesn't allow himself to wonder where they could possibly be now.

Oscar nods, wearing the same absent smile. "Got two myself. Alia and Cyan, my gorgeous girls. Alia's barely in the third grade." Something broken whisks across his face, and he fails to tamp it down. "Or. At least she was."

Daryl doesn't quite know what to do, and is relieved when Axel comes up to Oscar's side, patting his arm. "C'mon, man, let's get some grub then hit the sack."

"There are plenty of free cells," Hershel says from where he and the others have startled to trickle back into the inner block. "You're welcome to choose where to stay."

Oscar nods, but says nothing. He and Axel settle with their meal on the farthest end of the cafeteria benches. They must be perturbed about having so many new faces to look at. Daryl remembers what it was like to travel with just his father and uncle in an entirely self-contained world for so long, and the sudden variety of other people, not to mention the apocalypse, like meteors crashing in, perilously disconcerting.

So he stops in front of them before he can lose his nerve, and says, "You know we'd help you find your families if we could, right?"

It's Axel who smiles first, uneven it may be, but it's Oscar who says, only a little despairing, "Yeah. Thank you."

Daryl stays quiet for a second, the standard accepted moment of respectful silence reserved for dead people you don't know, then heads back to his perch.

In their cell, Glenn is telling Maggie about how he tried to pull Rick out of the boiler block, how he was attacked like a wild animal, though there couldn't possibly be wild animals as void of the will to carry on as Rick was. "I tried to get him to come back," Glenn sighs. "I really did."

"I know," Maggie soothes him, and Daryl clenches his eyes shut as tight as they can go.

* * *

Somebody (_Glenn_) must have told their newcomers that Daryl was just a teenager, because Axel dares to call him 'kid' the next morning, and Daryl doesn't stop glaring at him until he skulks away from breakfast early, mumbling something about fixing the generators and you gotta stop lookin at me like that, daryl, c'mon. Oscar has no such qualms, calling him sport and junior and kiddo, but otherwise doesn't talk down to him or treat him any different, so Daryl tolerates it. Just barely. Harmless ribbing must be something they both sorely miss, after being locked up in that pantry with two psychos for so long.

Carl's not eating. Just days ago he was ready to chow down kibble just to keep his ever-growing body fed, and Daryl's still debating whether he should call him out on it when Rick resurfaces. Shined up like a new penny and still making sure everyone's safe and secure, but even if Rick didn't stand two feet away from him Daryl can see his refusal to acknowledge his baby, see in his posture the pain of one who can't even recall joy.

He won't let Carl descend into the same pit of hopelessness. He can't.

So while clearing out the remaining walkers in solitary, Daryl tells Carl about his mother, and the fire that claimed her. He doesn't mention the fact that they found her blackened body gripping the bread knife she used to slash her wrists open, already dying when she set the couch in their apartment on fire. Absolutely nothing left to Daryl but his name, and his father's name, and he long ago stopped imagining what would have happened to him if his mom didn't put down 'Dixon' on his birth certificate, what other frightening course his life would have taken.

"I'm sorry about your mom." Carl's chin is tipped up now, resolute gaze peering out from under his Lone Ranger hat, and Daryl feels a give in the tense set of his shoulders, praying it doesn't show too much.

"Sorry about yours."

He's still thinking about that conversation, long after Oscar and Carl have gone on ahead, Carol's knife in his fist and too many things are hitting him like a flood, an earthquake with fault lines in his bones, trail of devastation left in its wake. Daryl can see it so clearly, he can fucking smell it. Blood and sulfur and decay, and whether it's been licked clean by flames or picked apart by gaping mouths, death always smells the same. He has his teeth gritted and his jaw is starting to ache, this flickering thing inside his stomach and the walker in the cell at the end won't stop pushing at the door and he needs everything to _stop_.

He kicks the cell open and Carol is sitting on the floor, her head turning towards his direction slowly, a dark-dawning sun. She lets Daryl carry her like a swooning bride, and he listens to her threadbare breaths against his shirt, tries not to grow unsteady on his feet, bracing himself as if against a strong wind.

"Holy shit," Axel exclaims from where he's wiping his fingers clean of engine grease, and Oscar asks, "She's alive? What's she need?"

"Just food and water," he says, and just like that they're gone, anxious to help out as well as cement their place in the group, Daryl hopes. Carol's eyes are a little clearer when they blink up at him, and he grins, letting his overwhelming elation bleed into his words. "Shit, woman, you got nine lives or somethin?"

Her voice is as parched as sawdust, but she still manages to laugh and say, "Well, I do always land on my feet." She touches Daryl's forehead and he takes that grubby hand, swallows it up inside his own.

Carol's reunion with the rest of them is bittersweet. There are tears on Rick's face as Carol takes in his baby for the first time, but it's not the same debilitating wreck as before, with his spirit vanishing irretrievably behind distant mountains. He kisses Lil Asskicker's downy forehead, goes down on a knee to hug Carl, but things don't stay tranquil for long.

The black woman's been shot in the leg and stripped of her samurai sword, but when she rises from her seat with a contorted expression of rage, he points his crossbow right at her. He won't underestimate people anymore. He won't hesitate to protect Rick again, and he tells Carl as much.

"Don't you worry about your old man. I'ma keep my eye on him."

Carl nods, already halfway reassured from the looks of it, and Daryl wishes Carl's near-hero worship of him would cease and desist already, because someday he's going to make a promise he can't keep, and what will he do then.

They've hardly cleared the gate when Rick turns around and asks, "Did you really name the baby Asskicker?"

Daryl supposes this must be small talk to ease the formidable silence their unnamed visitor brings, since Oscar jumps at the opportunity. He's the one stuck in the backseat with her after all. "Right after he gave her her first bottle feed," he says, hiding behind an amused smirk. "Probably thought he was entitled."

"Shut up," Daryl groans, throwing his forearm up to lay it over his eyes, forcing himself not to squirm. His face already feels hot to the touch.

Rick actually laughs, passing his hand over his chin and still looking right at Daryl, for some goddamn reason. "Carl's named her Judith. He gets to name her because of you."

Daryl shakes his head, his thumb rubbing over the gouge in the shotgun seat where it's bleeding stuffing, an incident involving T-Dog showing off with a balisong. "Maggie did the hard part," and he winces as the words leave his mouth, already regretting them.

"No. It was both of you." Rick makes an airless sighing sound, facing the road again. "I can never thank you enough for that."

A knot comes free in Daryl's chest, sudden and smooth and he stares at the line of Rick's jaw, finding it so hard to fathom how this man became a part of him.

"It's what we do," he says, closing his eyes and he can be blind for as long as he wants now, pretend he hasn't been ruined for anyone who wasn't Rick Grimes.


	12. trapped on a short leash,i'm no superman

Rick remembers.

It's a strange, almost flat sort of memory, in which things become bleak and bounded by the dark.

_What do you remember?_

You remember spending New Year's at someone else's dormitory, the city weirdly hushed, everyone localized inside bars and friends' apartments, empty bottles and cans rolling down the sidewalks, kicking aside noisemakers and pieces of tinsel, you remember thinking it's a good night for a party.

You remember Shane trying to do a keg stand and toppling over Jeff the Jesus freak instead, and someone else beating you to helping them up, and your world going slow for a second once you got a good look at her face.

You remember her looking at you from under her lashes and then darting her eyes away, blushing, and feeling a warmth gather in your chest that had nothing to do with alcohol, you remember her telling you _i'm lori,_ and you parroting her name because you wanted to memorize how it felt on your tongue.

You remember how you couldn't make out her features in the poor light, just her voice next to yours, the quick slide of her laugh, the way you could never quite recall in the morning what it was you'd sat on that rooftop talking about for so long, only a careful recollection of shadows and the clink of glass bottles, the burnt wood smell and the tight pull of the wind.

You remember Shane crowing _almost midnight, motherfuckers_, drunk-bright and near homicidal, and people pulling close together and Lori turning to you with a sweet wide smile and a shy _so you think we might as well?_, and you answering her by sealing her lips with yours the moment starbursts of color erupted above you.

You remember falling for her even after she dropped out of college, even after she moved back home, even after you told her you loved her but she didn't say it back right away, not until you got on one knee on her parents' porch still in newly-minted police uniform with your grandmother's ring hidden in your sock, the diamond knifing the skin of your ankle.

You remember her gasping with delighted laughter as she told you yes, of course yes, and sliding that ring onto her finger was the best thing you ever did, only knocked out of place once you held your son in your arms for the first time.

You remember the nights she'd banish you to the couch, the arguments where she'd speak over you, the lies you'd wear with a smile if only you were tired of dealing with her. You remember the bad, the selfish pettiness and the way you wore each other down. You remember the bad, but the good almost always outweighed it, and it was enough.

It should have been enough.

It's the memory of Lori that Rick misses, the almosts and could-have-beens, and that's what cripples him, undoes him at last because the infant crying in Maggie's arms will never know its mother, all it will know is gore and ashes and pain and he wants –

_Your mind is being chipped away at and what will you do –_

He wants the pain to stop. The heart-hurt –

So he makes it stop.

* * *

Time takes on the consistency of dough, stretching and then bunching, rolling in on itself to reveal tears in odd places. Rick is wading through the mire of the tombs with his senses gone numb, and the telephone's brisk ringing cuts through it all sharp enough to bleed the worst kind of sentiment: hope. He's almost sick with it, and his hand is trembling as it drops the phone into its analog cradle.

"She's gonna call again," he mutters. "They're gonna call again." Rick notes with disembodied consternation that he's filthy, fingers cold and gritty on his face and his shirt sticking to his heaving chest. The chilled gray non-light from the windows near the ceiling sketch soft shapes across the bloody floor, the crook of his arm. He's been up all night.

He pads to cell block C feeling uneasy, unsure of what to say when his group sees him in this state, but no one's around to judge him. From the cafeteria hall he can hear the murmur of voices winding together like yarn in a tapestry, and Rick's muddle of thoughts freeze into a raw lump in his stomach: he has a baby to take of, a baby that might not even be his.

The bag that holds Rick's personal effects has been placed by the metal stairs to the floor above. He takes the first shirt off the pile inside and heads to the showers, silent as a kid sneaking out after dark.

The showers had been dusty with disuse when they were found, and T-Dog had transported pails of water from the river to clean them some days ago, not minding the extra work. "I can't wait to finally get a nice long shower and not just a sorry-ass pat-down with wet towels," he'd told Rick, whistling with every measure of joy through the gap between his teeth.

Rick finds a half-filled bucket and dips the end of his new shirt in it, scrubs furiously at his face and neck and arms until every inch of them has gone pink and abraded. He feels hollowed out, his joints gone liquid from exhaustion. His wedding band is cleaned off as best it can, his curls combed into a semblance of calm. It's only while he buttons up that he realizes his shirt couldn't be more appropriate for this new day, black for mourning the dead and gone, and he represses the terrible urge to laugh.

"Everybody okay?" he asks as he finally presents himself to what's left of his group, and they all look up at him in the same instant, with exactly the same widening of worried eyes. Carl's face changes abruptly, mouth shrinking and Rick feels the wound in his heart gape further from the strain.

It's Maggie who speaks up first. "Yeah, we are," she says, young-child hesitance to her voice that she masks well. Beside her, Beth is shifting a motionless bundle in her arms, and Rick finds that he can't bring himself to look closer, to let what's right before him become anything more than a blur in his peripheral vision.

"What about you?" Hershel asks, and his gaze is so somber, his pity nauseating. Rick would snap at him for it but he can still recall looking at the man the same way after the shooting in the farmhouse, after he saw his wife die a second time. And so he deflects the query, tells him instead, "I cleared out the boiler block."

Daryl hasn't stop watching Rick since he walked in, and Rick's astutely aware of that fact when Daryl asks, "How many were there?"

Rick spares a glance at him and Daryl's eyes are scanning like computer chips, gathering information for later use, sparking Rick's nerves entirely the wrong way. "I don't know. A dozen, two dozen," he tells the air, pithy tones that betray his frayed patience. "I have to get back. Just wanted to check on Carl."

He squeezes his son's shoulder but Carl doesn't even deign to look up at him anymore, hiding under the brim of his sheriff's hat. Rick fitfully grasps for words of comfort to say but then Glenn stands up with:

"Rick, we can handle taking out the bodies. You don't have to,"

and Rick is reminded of how fragile this calm is, how easily it all can be taken away from them again, and he says, terse with insistence, "No, I do."

Hershel calls after him when he leaves and only in Rick's mind does it echo.

* * *

Rick should have known.

He was lingering in the space where Lori died; of course he'd find her ghost. She's as benign and gentle with him as she was on that rooftop, the night they met, asking him, "What happened, Rick? Baby, what happened?" and Rick can't stand her kindness. He doesn't deserve it.

"I loved you," he moans into the receiver, crouched into a miserable ball on the floor where his wife bled out, where her soul fled without him being able to say goodbye. "I _loved_ you. I should've said it, I. But I couldn't open that door, I couldn't risk it."

_i couldn't find it in me to forgive you just so you could hurt me again. i was too weak, too scared. i'm scared now._

"I loved you. I couldn't put it back together."

_there's never enough time._

But Lori proves him wrong. "You have a baby," she says, her voice taking on a fierce glittering edge. "_Our_ baby. And Carl, and Daryl –" and Rick's breath hitches pathetically with sobs. Static crackles and breaks up the rest of her words, nothing discernible but his name, said over and over. Rick shuts his eyes against the onslaught, hangs up the phone and it's like ripping off tags of his own flesh.

He doesn't know how long he stays there, gutshot and staring at nothing, fighting to keep his mind a perfect blank. There are subtle tremors stirring under his skin from his wife saying Daryl's name like it was important to him, like it mattered.

Lori must have known, in those last few months on the road. She saw how Rick got stuck on Daryl at inopportune moments, from Daryl's smooth shoulders to the happy little twist in his mouth, and Rick did his best to dodge her prying conversations, her hand cradling the indignant swell of her belly.

God knows they were both failing as a couple long before the world got shot to hell, but it didn't have to have ended like this. She shouldn't have been taken from their lives like this.

"I'm sorry," Rick whispers, and leaves Lori's tomb.

When he first withdrew from solitude, Rick all but blustered into the room, chiseled by the hard times into a callus to protect himself. Now he's hesitant, finally allowing his guard down to see the baby squirming in Hershel's arms, and every mechanical part of Rick breaks down. Carl and Beth are smiling at him when he presses kisses on the crown of that soft, downy head, clasps that precious body close.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" Hershel remarks, and Rick lets out a watery chuckle. He has a daughter, a sweet little girl. The world becomes bearable again, mesmerizingly bright. He turns to Carl with a sighed "I'm sorry," far wearier than it should be, but Carl only grins.

"Asskicker hasn't been outside yet," he says, and Rick laughs, the sound brittle in his throat, but it's there. "You named her Asskicker?"

Hershel gets his crutches to stand, informs Rick, "We were at a loss for names, actually. Daryl picked it."

Rick exhales, careful of more than just the physical weight on his chest, looks to his son again. "Let's get her into the sunshine, hm?"

It's noon and everything looks gleaming and fresh, brand new. Rick wants to talk to Carl about Lori, knowing that the weight of that particular cross must have about smashed his boy into the earth, but he decides against it. It's too lovely a day to dredge up the not-too-distant past. Their troubles can be set aside for now.

And trouble, typically, chooses the worst possible moment to grace them again.

* * *

"But I have to go," Beth cries out, a little too loud, her face flush with exasperation. From across the corridor, Daryl and Axel duck their heads further, tucking grenades and ammo into a duffel bag and doing their best to keep to themselves. Before Rick can try talking her out of going once more, Hershel lays a hand on Beth's shoulder.

"I'm as worried for them as you are, Beth. But we have to stay here. We have family to protect here too."

The young woman's mouth thins, more out of disquiet than fear, and Rick's fatherly fondness for her is stoked with a passion. She found strength she never knew she'd had all along, during those long cold months, and he knows they'll be alright while they're gone.

"Four of us are going to get Glenn and Maggie," Rick says, repeating his words from earlier. "And we're bringing them back."

Beth catches the determination behind Rick's statement, and she nods, her smile faint yet entrusting. Rick squeezes her arm where Hershel's hand still rests, goes to check up on what other supplies they'll need.

Daryl's face is angled down, but Rick catches the flick of his eyes, awareness of Rick's proximity flickering over him. He jerks something out of his jeans pocket, then, a move that looks like it's been rehearsed in his head.

"Here," Daryl says, and it's two granola bars, the wrapping a shiny orange, aberrantly cheery in his grip. "Y' ain't gonna be much use half-starved," he mumbles when Rick doesn't take the offering right away, his hand wavering like maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.

"Thank you," Rick manages, and takes the bars, pulse uncomfortable in his throat. There must be a magnet or something, some curse making his eyes stick to Daryl with such persistence. He remembers abruptly what Daryl had said about Oscar and Axel that fateful morning, the calm before the storm. _i get guys like this. hell, i coulda been in there with them, if i was old enough._

And now Oscar's gearing up right alongside them, to face down the Governor (Rick can't say the capital-letter-important title in his head without a little incredulity; these secondhand tales seem to be more outlandish than the man their silent visitor claims him to be). Oscar's proven his merit before, and Rick may willingly trust the man, but he knows that when shit goes sideways, it'll be Daryl, the unlikeliest thing that's ever happened to Rick, who sticks by his side.

Carol is sitting on the stairs holding his baby, her tired face set aglow with devotion. Daryl has slumped at her feet and is etching 'Lil Asskicker' in painstaking cursive onto the side of a box Beth had unearthed from one of the cells. Rick stares at them for a long time, thinking with perfect clarity: _home_.

* * *

"Daryl, it was Merle," Glenn struggles to say, wheezing like he has wet newspaper plastered over his mouth. "He did this."

From where he's just checked the rest of the room, Daryl stills completely, then spins on his heel to look at Glenn, disbelief leaping into his face, and Rick almost can't register anything past that. "You saw him?" he has to ask, but he already knows the truth. Merle's trademark gleeful violence is staring right at him in the bruises curling frondlike around Glenn's torso, his misshapen face.

Glenn strains to slip his arms into the hoodie a grim-lined Maggie helps with into as he continues, "He threw a walker at me, he was gonna execute us."

A swallow that looks painful moves Daryl's throat, and he speaks up with, "So, so Merle's this Governor?"

Maggie's quick to answer. "No, somebody else. Your father's his lieutenant or something." Her eyes flash anxiously from Glenn to Daryl, thrumming with the need to get out of this suburban dystopia as soon as possible, and Rick concurs. He and Maggie are helping Glenn to his feet when Daryl says, a wicking unevenness to his voice, "Hey, if Merle's around I nee- I need to see him."

"Not now, we're in hostile territory," Rick says. It's a poor choice of words; he doesn't want Merle Dixon anywhere near his son ever again, even if there was no onslaught of bullets and grievances between them.

But Daryl is disintegrating right before them, shivering tense and undeterred. "He's my dad, he ain't gonna —"

"Look at what he did! We have to get out of here now, right now."

"Maybe I can talk to him, maybe I can work something out."

Daryl's clutching and tearing at reason, desperate for purchase, and Rick has to shut him down. "You're not thinking straight. Look, no matter what they say they heard, Glenn can barely walk. How are we gonna make it out if we get overrun by walkers and this Governor catches up to us, I need you," he snarls out these last three words, watches how they hit Daryl like a finely-shaped dart, the downward breaks of his eyebrows and the crease of his mouth. "Are you with me?"

It's a horrible accordioned thing in Rick's lungs, this waiting for an answer. But then Daryl's face changes, somehow, invisible locks clicking open to showcase the trust he has in Rick, the sight as rare as a solar eclipse and impossible to look away from in the same fashion. "Yeah," he breathes out, and they're standing close enough together that Rick can feel that simple word kiss his skin, warming him with something more than relief.

* * *

Rick is raining bullets onto the figures clad in smoke, the stock of his Browning pressing hard and flat to his forearm, sweeping across the road he's kneeling on to cover the others' departure. Adrenaline pours through him, his mouth gone dry. It feels like he has a bird's heart in his chest right now.

He sets his weapon down to reload, rips his gaze towards another direction, and there's Shane.

He's striding towards Rick as he cocks his shotgun, face as young and fuck-it-all as it was in their early days at the academy. Shane's name falls out of Rick on a disbelieving rasp, gone deaf and dumb and blind to everything else.

Shane fires and Oscar goes down, his last dying act pushing Glenn onto the safety of a barricade. Only then does rational thinking return to Rick, and he shoots the man with Shane's face in the cheek, a new addition to the parade of nightmares to come to him in sleep. He has to stand over the corpse, he has to see for himself that this man looks nothing like Shane at all.

Maggie screams for him and he screams for Daryl, and all he gets in reply is a thunderclap of burning metal.

* * *

Rick wakes up in the guard tower when it's still dark out. His jacket is pulled over his shoulder in place of a blanket, and his ring has left a numb slivered line on his cheek. His mouth tastes thick and stale, his tongue sluggish against his teeth.

He gets to his feet and cracks his back with a yawn. He's drained, beaten down thin as gold, and maybe it's only exhaustion but he can hear a malignant hum in the trees, smell murder on the wind. It's just barely dawn, shadows only starting to thicken and when he steps out the air is thirty degrees cooler than by day, but still heavy.

He takes up his rifle and screws his eye into the scope, looking at the world through crosshairs. He doesn't know what he's waiting to see.

Rick doesn't know how long it's been since Woodbury, and since then he's done nothing but chase ghosts. Sometimes he sits by the telephone, and Shane talks to him about a Braves game they went to once, how enthused they were back then, how alive they were back then. Sometimes he says out loud, "damn it, you should have told me," but he's talking to Daryl.

Right now it's Lori, another memory of her, this time presented in startling daylight clarity and clothed in the dress she wore when she walked up to him at the altar, but now it's Rick coming to meet her. She rests her hand on his face, smiling at him, beautiful even in this sudden awareness of feigned presence that makes the present absence unbearable.

He closes his eyes and waits for the happiness to start.

* * *

**on a completely unrelated note: i was rereading this whole thing to try and remember how to write again and do any of y'alls remember the rainstorm in chapter ten, with the little aside that walkers can get torn apart by heavy water? eugene proved that to be canon in 5.05, in that incident with the fire truck hose. made me giggly as fuck, it did.**

**i lifted a lot of neil gaiman's sandman to put in this one. muffins to those who spot them. (:**


	13. interlude iii: standing up falling down

The night has coagulated in his tired joints, all of Woodbury howling for his blood, and Merle has eyes for no one but Daryl.

"You wanted your son," the Governor tells him in soft undertones, his one good eye alight with manic glee, "and now you got him."

The shock of seeing Daryl for the first time in nearly a year isn't dulled even by the more pressing issues at hand. He's taller now, broader, yet still bearing the ranginess of a youth who has yet to acquire the muscle and bulk that adulthood would bring. All skin and starved bone, more like, and Merle's resentment of Officer Friendly grows another respectable inch.

But his boy's alive. That much he can hand to the asshole. Daryl's alive, and Merle plans on keeping him that way. "Follow my lead, boy, we're getting outta this," he hisses as he pins Daryl to the dusty ground. The kicked-puppy dread in Daryl's face transforms into one of understanding, and when they get to their feet he rolls his back onto Merle's with his fists raised. The shifting war of their shoulder blades through sweat-drenched cloth is like picking up a conversation hours later.

The night sky comes all the way down to ground level, uninterrupted dark in every direction. Rick leads the way by flashlight with Chinaman's girlfriend trailing him, the both of them exchanging glances with their mouths shut into tight seams. Only Daryl doesn't act as if there's a ticking bomb on his heels, and defends Merle with his whole body even when he does explode much later.

Rick must have clocked him good anyway because Merle wakes up with pain rolling through his head in an undercurrent so bad that he throws up onto the browned leaves. He gets on unsteady feet with a moan, a taste like brine in the back of his throat. He never did care much for the sea.

Out on the road, Daryl and the head honchos are discussing his fate, and Merle's too far away and groggy to read their lips, suss out what's happening. But then Daryl breaks away, some kind of ultimatum thrown down since Glenn calls after him, Rick chases him down. They stand much too close together, Rick's whole form a silent plea, leaning in the slightest bit to bracket Daryl.

But Daryl walks right up to Merle, where he belongs, and Merle aims an unadulterated grin on Rick, gloating without shame. _see, friendly, he's _my_ boy, not yours. i win this time._

Except he doesn't.

It's as if Daryl left all his fire back on that highway, wordlessly following orders, not rising to any of Merle's barbed jabs or crass jokes, carrying their knapsack for two miles without muttering insults at Merle when his back is turned, like he used to. Daryl's new record: twenty-eight hours without talking to Merle. Merle never thought he'd miss the kid's bitching, their petty fights.

The first time Merle ever met him, Daryl was this seven year old underfed mute at his front door with eyes taking up most of his face, dirty hands, clothes too big or too small. Merle could only half-listen to the social worker blather about his candidacy for full custody, too busy searching for himself in this blonde boy so terrified of the world.

In the present, Daryl flops over in his sleeping bag with a miniscule shudder, and Merle lets his gaze wander to the sky held up by trees, thickly packed with clouds, starless and moonless. He keeps waiting for rain, for a biter horde, anything that will break the monotony of their days.

"Here," Daryl says at long last, as dawn breaks. He's holding out the blade of a knife he's massacred, and gestures to Merle's metal stump. "Don't gotta have you half-seconds behind if there's company."

Merle huffs but takes the blade, secures it to his wrist with duct tape. "I kick ass plenty fine without no weapons, boy," he chides, but Daryl has turned away, Jess' angel wing vest along his shoulders and it makes Merle irrationally cross. It's a stupid thing, an irreversible fault. He's not getting his brother back.

Jess was the one who got Daryl to open up, back then, bribing the kid with Kit-Kats and dog-eared comic books. He sat Daryl down and held him when he screamed from night terrors, kept saying, you're not getting rid of us. Merle would watch for a while from the hallway then step outside, cigarette smoke and the moon helping him to breathe again.

He couldn't promise that he wouldn't follow his own father's violent tendencies, complete the vicious cycle. So he remained a background figure in Daryl's life, did a minor stint in jail and when he came back his son was calling Jess _dad_.

That unsettled Merle a lot more than he thought it would.

"Why don't we find a stream, look for some fish?" Daryl is peering at nothing through his crossbow sight, his tone overtly casual, and Merle steps away from the tree he pissed against, zips up with a scoff. "I think you're just tryna lead me back to the road, get me over to that prison."

Daryl jumps at the given opening, goes at it from a passive-aggressive angle. "They got shelter, food. A pot to piss in might not be a bad idea."

"They're all dead. Makes no difference."

It's only a twitch, a skinny flick of Daryl's eyes, but it's enough. "How can you be so sure?"

Merle smirks, humorless. "Right about now our Governor's hostin a housewarming party where he's gon' bury what's left of your pals." He hawks up some spit, jostles Daryl's shoulder. "Let's hook some fish."

That's the end of Daryl talking to Merle again, until they start debating as to what creek it is they've run into. They're almost back to normal, and then the family on the bridge rends their unstable alliance completely.

Daryl has his crossbow trained on Merle like it's nothing, the planes of his face turned to stone and arms radiating a disciplined kind of violence. Merle doesn't bother watching the terrified spics drive away, glaring at Daryl until the bow is out of his way. The kid then strides on ahead like he doesn't have time to deal with this shit, and thunder rumbles from behind disgruntled clouds, another kind of storm taking its time.

"The fuck you doin, pointin that thing at me?" he hisses, after he tires of this angry silence, being treated as if he's the one at fault.

"They were scared," Daryl growls, not even deigning to look back at Merle.

"Rude is what they were, and they owed us a token of gratitude."

"They didn't owe us shit."

And Merle surges forward, all but yelling now, "You helpin people outta the goodness of your heart? Even though you might die doing it? That something your Sheriff Rick taught you?"

Daryl whips around then, snapping, "There was a baby!"

"Oh, otherwise you woulda just left 'em to the biters, then?"

Words stall and lag in Daryl's eyes, and he finally cries out, "I went back for you, alright? And you weren't there. I didn't cut you up neither, you did that. They locked you up on that damn roof 'cause you asked for it."

Now he's _defending_ the fuckers, and Merle has to laugh, cruel laugh rotted all the way through. "You know what's funny to me? You an' Sheriff Rick, you're all cuddled close now. What'd he do to you, huh?" All his subliminal fears come pouring out in a rush. "Bend you over and croon sweet nothings to win you over, that it? Made you his personal piece of ass?"

Daryl pales under the grime and sweat covering his face, and screams, "He was _there_. He treated me like a person, not some burden or, or obligation. But you? You were never there for me. You never even wanted me!"

Julie was the waitress at the bar Merle chose to get wasted at, two days before he was to report to his post. Dirty blonde and more handsome than pretty with her squarish jaw, wide shoulders though she was a little thing, bustling from one table to the next. She was witty in her own quiet way, and became abruptly and extremely appealing whenever she laughed, one of those faces that works like that. Merle must have been drunk and stoned enough to give his real name, though he left her bed the next morning without looking back. He didn't think about her or remember her until the consequences of their actions arrived on his doorstep years later. He didn't love Julie, didn't think he could bring himself to care for a son he hadn't known existed, but.

Merle is furious, blinding mad that Daryl would dare consider it, and even that is overmatched by a wrecking thrum of sorrow, the idea that his child doesn't think he'd protect his own flesh and blood.

Daryl turns and Merle suffers one panicked thought: _keep him close, keep him safe_. "Don't you walk away from me, boy," he cries out, trying to grab Daryl by the knapsack and.

He lets out a strangled yelp, and it's not one of indignation but of surprise and pain, and Daryl's shoulder is bared and bleeding from Merle's knife and Christ, Jesus Christ.

"What are you, wait, wait, lemme see —" He's stammering and pathetic like he never is, but Daryl angrily shrugs him off, starts marching north. "Where you goin?"

Daryl looks exhausted, now that Merle's seeing him, truly seeing him, brown thumbprints under his eyes and his lips bitten and chapped, spine bending from more than just physical wounds. "Back where I belong."

"I can't go with you." Merle struggles to pull himself together, measure his voice. "I, I tried to kill that black bitch. Damn near killed Chinese kid."

Daryl sighs, like it matters, "He's Korean."

"Whatever," Merle says fast, hating himself just a little bit. "I just, I just can't go with you."

"You know, I may be the one walkin away," and Daryl looks down for a moment, uttering something too close to a sob, "but you're the one that's leavin. Again."

Words his deepest-cutting weapons, and this time they've gotten Merle clean down to the bone. Every step Daryl takes further away from him staggers and twists Merle's heart like a rag. His son has a home that doesn't include him in the picture, doesn't earn Merle a cursory glance back, as if nine months with these people matter more than the decade he's been trying his best.

Merle doesn't see much of himself in his son, doesn't see the mean spirit he tried so hard to instill, and maybe that's a not a bad thing. Instead he sees Jess' gentleness, his old man's stubborn determination, and something else he doesn't recognize but knows must have come from Julie, alongside that blonde hair and huge heart. Merle's eyes are burning with tears though he doesn't know why, and he makes a strained sound, starts following the path Daryl has set for himself.

Merle will never be good enough to keep Daryl safe, but he'll be damned if he doesn't at least try.


	14. i am a rabbit out of room

**once again, updates might slow down because of real life annoyances. thanks to all who have been rad so far. i'd say more but it's eleven pm and my eyes are dying. mwah, mwah.**

* * *

Striding through the thick underbrush that leads to the prison, Daryl gets a creeping feeling in his gut, a sense of imminent violence that he'd developed through years of practice. He glances at Merle and Merle's face is pinched in atypical uneasiness – he feels it too.

They're maybe half a mile away when the sounds of shooting reach their ears.

"Fuck," Daryl spits, and starts running, running until his heart is pounding in his tongue, pressed up against the roof of his mouth and he just propels himself forward. He nearly topples over a walker and another would've gotten its teeth into his left arm, still red-stained from his cut, if Merle hadn't blown its head off. They pass at least a dozen more walkers being drawn in by the barrage of gunfire, stooped-shuffling and gurgling.

Even as he stops to string his crossbow, he's already offering God various bargains if He'd only keep everyone alive, except the first thing Daryl sees as the fences emerge from the green is Rick, completely exposed and pinned down by two walkers.

He picks it out cleanly, without thinking, and Merle takes down the other one. Rick's eyes go huge, immensely relieved and not trying to hide it, and together they dispatch the rest. Still, walkers are roaming the wrong side of the fence, their fortress blown wide open to welcome more. Their worries are far from over.

Rick ends up slumping against the chain link, staring at their desecrated fields with his breaths fast and shallow. His shirt is all but mortared to him, his face a blur of weariness and fury that resonates like a five hundred year old church bell. Daryl clears his throat, says, as tentative as can be, "We gotta get inside."

At first Rick doesn't stir, and Daryl's gaze jumps involuntarily to Rick's, and finds Rick staring at the half-dried rivulets of blood on him, trailing from shoulder to wrist. "You're bleeding," he says, in a glue-and-sandpaper voice that tells Daryl he hasn't had water for a pretty long while.

"It's, it ain't a bite," Daryl says, hating how Rick goes gray with anxiety and worst case scenarios. "I'm fine."

"You're _hurt_."

Rick has been reduced to a recalcitrant child, and Daryl has to smirk. "You're worse off, trust me."

Trying to keep his spine upright, Rick gives a curt little nod, takes a step forward and nearly loses his balance. Daryl has to dart forward and anchor him, free hand spread over Rick's heaving chest. "C'mon now, arm around me," he says, trying to make light of the situation. "We done this before, 'member?"

Merle is skewering them with a searching look, all his earlier accusations coming back to nibble at Daryl like fire ants. Heat rises up his neck and he chews on his lower lip to keep focused, Rick's solid weight pressing against his side and his arm heavy around Daryl's shoulders not helping one bit. He secures his crossbow, tells Merle, "Cover us," and Merle grabs the large metal pipe laying by the wayside.

They get onto the open grounds unscathed, the walkers spread out wide enough that they come at Merle one at a time for him to stab and swing at. From behind the remaining gates, someone yells out to them, and they have cover fire the rest of the way.

Carl almost tackles Rick with a hug once they're safe, and Carol's arms go around Daryl so tightly that his ribs creak, and he hisses, the healing bruises flaring up again. "Oh God, I'm sorry," Carol says, her exuberance immediately replaced with concern. "Are you – Daryl, you're bleeding."

"Ain't a bite," Daryl reiterates, avoiding everyone's eyes, and twitches his shoulder up and down to demonstrate how alright he is, not minding the dull burrowing ache. "Just a little. Just an accident with a knife, is all."

Merle's tension is palpable, there in the tic at the hinge of his jaw, and Rick doesn't miss it, straightening from his slouch over Carl and asking, voice gone cold, "Did you do that? Did you do that to your own son?"

"Rick, _jesus_ —" Daryl rushes to get between them, Merle standing his ground but not firing his mouth off either, knowing he doesn't have a dog in this fight. Rick is unstoppable when he's furious, weakened as he is; Daryl's seen that firsthand, and he has to hold Rick back by the shoulder and convince him, "It was an accident. Wouldn't have brought 'im with me if it weren't."

Rick exhales, coarse and labored as if it's killing him not to drop Merle like a sack of potatoes again. He levels Daryl with a strange, helpless look, lines carving up the ends of his lips, and not knowing what it means doesn't halt the reflective pain from spearing through Daryl. He's never gotten used to this, what Rick does to him.

"I need to look the both of you over," Hershel says, in the forcibly mild tones of a peacemaker. "So why don't we settle this inside." A marginal amount of stiffness drains out from Rick's muscles under Daryl's hand, and only then does Daryl deem it safe to move away.

But Rick isn't satisfied, and meets Merle's murky glare head-on, tells him deathly serious, "Lay a hand on him again and I will shoot you where you stand," his voice quiet enough for just the two of them and Daryl to hear. Daryl blinks fast and spins the other way, strange shiverywarm thing happening in his chest that he tries to suppress, without much success.

Glenn is still on edge, but offers Daryl a quick smile, as do Maggie and Hershel. "Welcome back," Beth says, and Carl punches at Daryl's arm in reserved cheer when Daryl remembers: "Where's Axel?"

Carl shakes his head, and Daryl follows his somber gaze to where Carol is draping a sheet over a lone bullet-riddled figure on the ground, a puppet with its strings abruptly cut. Daryl takes it worse than he thought he would, the desire to chop the Governor into vicious bits intensifying with each second. And from the enthusiastic way Michonne is impaling walker heads on her sword through the wire, she stands with them too.

"This is as far as you go," Rick bites out to Merle, leaving him stranded in the cafeteria block as the rest of them filter to their cells, and Merle flashes an insincere madman's grin. "Five-star treatment and the whole shebang, how kind o' y'all," he sneers, but says nothing more, thank god.

Hershel tells Daryl to sit on the stairs, and cuts off what's left of his shirt to wipe his shoulder and arm clean. Daryl bites and gnashes at the air as the iodine that feels more like napalm seeps into his considerably deep wound, breathes out in slow relief once the gauze and the bandage cover it up. Rick is pacing listlessly by them, Daryl hyperaware of how the redyellowblue hues on his stomach and the shadowed outline of his ribcage are bared for all to see. He curls up in incremental inches, retreating as much as he can into his shell.

"Now what's wrong with Rick?" Daryl demands as he pulls on a new shirt, and Carl shifts uneasily on his feet, Hershel emitting his well-known long-suffering sigh. "He hasn't eaten or slept properly in days," he says, and Rick seems chastised enough, guilty; what's odd is that he can't meet Daryl's eye anymore.

"Carl, you make sure he gets enough water and a decent meal, then gets straight to bed," and the kid nods at Hershel, starts shepherding his father to their designated food supply section, and Daryl knows he's right about Carl being strong, stronger than he'll ever realize he is.

Beth comes down the stairs with Lil Asskicker, Judith, and Daryl smiles on reflex, reaches out to stroke her tiny fingers to try and endure what Beth is telling him, about the newcomers Rick kicked out, about him screaming at shadows, about his wandering far beyond their gates searching for something that wasn't there.

Daryl decides to form himself into a wall, a sheer cliff for the tidal roar of Rick's loss to crash against. He'll make himself solid and senseless and strong, and he will get Rick through this, be whatever he needs, never leave him or their people again.

* * *

Daryl takes to the cell by the stairs, despite the fact that the stone and metal enclosing turning him claustrophobic, years of darting in and out of juvenile detention and being told 'watch it or you'll end up in jail,' threats of prison being over his head as the boogeyman. Except he can't stand Glenn's sullen anger, well-placed as it is. Rick, Beth, and Hershel seem to be the only ones trying to let bygones be bygones, and he needs the privacy to fletch makeshift bolts and clean his weapons until he's no longer vibrating like there isn't room enough inside him, like he's about to split at the seams.

Carol comes by just as Daryl's toeing off his boots, and he offer her a small, self-conscious smile, asks, "You okay?"

She smiles back and sits down on the desk by the cell's entrance, quipping, "I was gonna ask you the same thing."

Daryl huffs, stretches out his injured shoulder, cramped up from sitting rigidly for so long. "S'healing fine, don't worry."

Carol goes quiet, visibly gathering appropriate things to say behind her eyes and settling on, "He's your father, but he's not good for you. Don't let him bring you down."

Not knowing how to respond to that, Daryl shrugs, twiddles at the edges of his bandage. Carol senses his unwillingness to talk, and changes the subject with, "Rick seems to have stabilized, now that you're back."

Daryl's wicked heart leaps at the delusion, that Rick was devastated by his leaving, and he has to blow out a breath, concentrate on Carol's words. "We're all glad. It's good, having you home."

"This is a tomb, not a home," Daryl mumbles, and he's remembering T-Dog, and Lori, and Axel, everyone they've lost. And so is Carol, since she says, "That's what T-Dog called it. Thought he was right, until you found me."

And Daryl kind of smiles, but it hangs strange and uneven. He will never understand the surety Carol has in him, the faith that everyone's placed in him, wicked wicked boy trying to fake being a man. But maybe someday, somewhere far down the line, he'll finally be able to deserve their care, their love.

* * *

After the harsh words exchanged between all of them earlier, Daryl can't blame Rick for being so paranoid with Andrea. Everyone's loyalties are questionable now. But he doesn't shake off Andrea when she hugs him, surprised as he is by it, even laying a tentative pat on her arm and staying still until she lets go.

"I'm so glad you're okay," she says in a rush, glancing from him to Merle. "When Phillip made you two try to hurt each other, I. I tried to stop it, Daryl. Really, I did."

"I know," Daryl tells her, and means it. "It ain't your fault."

Michonne is staring at them – more specifically, at Andrea – with the mask of her face wavering briefly like there's a wind blowing through her, and Daryl blinks, rather taken aback. He's only ever seen that expression when he's staring into the mirror thinking about Rick.

It becomes all too clear that Andrea's been fed nothing but lies, which is why she and Michonne had ever even split up in the first place. His malignant hate of the Governor, Phillip, whatever his name is, makes him terse with Andrea, and he announces, "Next time you see your boyfriend, tell him I'ma take his other eye."

Rick feels the same way, putting his foot down by walking out of the conversation. Two by two the others leave as well, retreating into the inner block to leave Andrea floundering by herself. "Can we talk?" she asks Michonne, exasperated, and Daryl watches them step outside, well aware of his invasiveness and unable to stop himself.

It's his turn to be the lookout, and if the first thing he does is meander over to where Andrea's slumped in the shade of the guard tower, that's not from any lack of vigilance on his part.

"Hey," he offers, tentative, and when Andrea doesn't react in any averse way, he sits beside her, observing the walkers paw at them in vain through the fences, a lot closer than comfortable. And that's what gives him an idea.

Daryl gets to his feet, leaning heavily on his rifle like he would a cane, and says, "Help me gank these ugly fuckers." Andrea eyes his outstretched hand and smiles, drawn thin as it is, allows herself to be pulled up.

There's a pleasant catharsis that comes with killing the undead, and by the time they're done picking off the nearest threats, Andrea's profile is less tense, a calming sense of security in the excessive number of corpses dropped to the baking asphalt.

"I'm gonna have to get back," she says, apologetic. "They're wondering where I am, right now."

Daryl nods. "I'll see if we can get ya some wheels."

Andrea's grin turns impish, and she teases, "You gonna let me borrow your chopper, hotshot?"

"Not on your life, lady," he scoffs, though he's grinning back at her while he moves away. There's a beat-up car that he last saw sitting around in one of the inner blocks, the key still in the ignition. Everything seems to be in working order as he pops the hood, though there's nothing in the tank. He finds a plastic jug to put gas in, and a clear hose to use as a siphon. He's walking up to where the Bonnie is when he hears it being kickstarted, sees Merle planted firmly on it.

Daryl had forgotten that the bike was Merle's first; it took him months before he could regard it without feeling left off-kilter. Now he tries to reconcile the tired man before him with the picture of Merle that glowered and laughed in his mind for months, the lifetime Daryl has lived without him. He doesn't know if it's Merle or himself that has changed too much, changed beyond recognition.

He clears his throat, and asks, "You testin her out?"

Merle is scowling, affronted by the inarguable difference in the whine of the engine. "The tranny on her sounds all coughed up, boyo," he says by way of greeting, hardly glancing up.

Daryl makes a noncommittal sound. "Axel woulda fixed it."

"That's the guy who was in here?" Merle rests his metal stump against the hand clutch, then snatches it away, just now aware that he can't operate his bike as he used to, and Daryl bites his lip.

"Yeah. Scoot over, will ya."

He goes about his business, all too keenly mindful of Merle's gaze on the bandage around his shoulder, yet another of the countless little faults he's done to Daryl and never apologized for. "What you doin that for?" he asks instead.

Daryl doesn't answer for a moment, stalling by sucking the gas up into the hose first. "Gotta get Andrea a ride back," he says once he's done, screwing the cap back on. "Hell knows what might happen, if this Governor's as paranoid as you guys say he is and she ain't back."

"Hell knows," Merle parrots, aiming for condescension and falling flat, his brow deeply lined and his hand squeezing into a fist. He keeps running up against the wall of what he made happen, what started this war, forgetting it briefly in the investigative rush of Andrea's loyalties, and Daryl has the pleasure of watching him remember again and again, that terrible black thing shuttering across his eyes.

But Daryl doesn't want to pick a fight with him about that, not now. Not ever, though he does mutter under his breath, "birds of a feather," as he strides away. He pretends he doesn't glimpse the resigned, toned-down misery on Merle's face, which he usually covers with anger. His so-called devotion to Daryl has become a mirror's reflection in an unlit room, an articulation of empty space.

It occurs to Daryl, not for the first time, that he is the worst thing that's ever happened to Merle.

He tries to fight the sinking feeling in his heart with a distraction, and finds Rick with Carl in the generator room, pulling out the corpses that have piled up from the breach. "You guys need help?" he asks, already setting aside his rifle, and Rick shakes his head.

"We're good," he says, wiping his face with his sleeve, marginally cleaner than the rest of him. Blood and grit are stuck to his arms, streaked on his neck. The parts of Rick that are clean shine pale and bright in the dimness, silver coins in a cloudy pond, so gorgeous Daryl could just murder him.

He says, over the cacophony of his hindbrain, "I maybe thought we could use that extra car to send Andrea off."

"Does it have enough fuel?"

"It does now," he states, and Rick hums, contemplative, watching Carl drag a walker to the exit by its once-violet dress, then looking back at Daryl.

Rick picks up the rifle from where it's stooped beside the door and hands it back to Daryl. "Then let's see her off."

* * *

Daryl slams awake from another bout of nightmares, the kind he never remembers what it was about but leaves a sharp, bitter trace on his tongue. He's been having more and more of those recently, can't decide if that's a blessing or a curse.

It's an hour or two shy of dawn when he wanders out, and he takes a nice long piss against the open fence, taking childish glee in how it splatters the lone walker stretching its arms through the chain link. A slow creak of metal hinges has him starting, and he spins around with a hand on his holster to find Rick making his way down the steps, yawning with the hair on the side of his skull smashed flat.

"Hey," he greets Daryl once he's close enough, and Daryl nods back, already digging through his pockets for his carton and his lighter, the itch for a cigarette springing up like tufts of wool inside his shirts, under his skin, so he can have something to do. He takes a huge drag as Rick steps beside him, glancing down and his scuffed boots are six inches away from Daryl's. That transfixes him for some unknown reason.

They stand there for a while, watching the sky grow brighter by inches. Daryl manages an almost-perfect smoke ring, cringing inward from mortification at how pleased he is by the amused sound Rick emits.

"Carl told me something, yesterday," he says at length, treading carefully, and Daryl shifts, focuses all his attention. "He said I should stop being the leader. Let Glenn and Hershel make the hard calls."

That wouldn't be a half-bad idea, Daryl muses. Rick will never have time to look after himself if he keeps worrying over the rest of them first, and of course Carl can see that, as clearly as the rest of them do. But that decision isn't his, or Daryl's, to make. "So are you gonna?" he says aloud.

Rick sighs. "With the Governor wanting us all dead or worse, I. I don't know."

Daryl's at a loss for words. Rarely does Rick let his guard down like this, willingly, and this time it's Daryl he trusts enough.

"Maybe," he says, doing his best to grasp the reins of his thoughts, "maybe when all this is over, y'know. When that sick fuck is gone and we can breathe."

"Mm. Maybe." Rick's eyes on him are strangely weighted, meaningful, and Daryl has to turn away, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end from the attention.

The walker in front of them has been joined by three more of its pals, and Daryl sneers at them, huffs smoke in their faces since it seems to agitate them more, but maybe not. His perception has been all warped by the earliness of the hour. "Let's grab some food. You should prolly get Carl up, and Michonne. You got a ways to go yet."

Before he can move, however, Rick's hand shoots out, fingers wrapping around Daryl's wrist and Daryl is too surprised to tug free. "I am glad you're back," Rick says, and it's his same words from last night, but his tone, the phrasing, _something_, and of course his unwavering hold on Daryl. Surely Rick must feel how fast Daryl's pulse is going.

Daryl swallows, ash and stupid hope mixing thick in his throat, and nods, watches Rick withdraw. He thinks Rick must be smiling at him, but can't look up at his face to be sure, a persistent brick-colored flush on his cheeks preventing him. And it doesn't matter, if Rick is smiling and he can't see it.

There are more important things, after all.


	15. never had a leg to stand on

From the shotgun seat, everything feels the same, swift gravel artery under their tires and green seas of grass on either side of them. Carl is rummaging through the hiker's backpack with a discomposed look on his face. Rick studies him through the rear view glass for a while, wondering if he should say something about the anonymous man they refused to help, and eventually decides against it.

Michonne's silence is no longer as hostile as it used to be. The incongruous paper mache cat perched by the stick-shift put a damper on that daunting air, and Rick smiles at it absently again. A bump on the road jostles his damaged shoulder and dislodges that smile, his breath escaping him in a pained whistle. Michonne glances at him quickly, then asks, "What does it say on that bottle you're holding, Carl?"

Carl frowns down at the white plastic container he's fished out of the backpack. "Um. Tylenol."

"Give one to your dad."

Rick reaches back on instinct for the little red pill and the water bottle Carl slips him, and thanks Michonne. She just gives him a grim smirk, says, "Good thing you spotted that pack when you did."

It seems callous, now that Rick thinks back on it, to rob that man in death, but he doesn't allow himself to dwell on it. Today was a good day. They have their firepower, more supplies. Morgan, broken as he is, seems to have found a purpose. Rick can only hope that he can successfully uphold his own.

Daryl and Carol are the ones who meet them in the early summer dusk, running to open and close the gate. Rick climbs out of the car slowly, careful and stiff, and Daryl zeroes in on that, a rasping undertone of worry to his voice as he says, "Ran into some trouble?"

Rick takes the hiker's bag from Carl, wincing but otherwise braving the strain. "An old friend."

Daryl snorts, pulling the first backpack he can reach from the trunk. "Some friend." He's trying to play it off like it's nothing, but his eyebrows are collapsed, making him solemn and old.

"He wasn't himself," Rick says, an ache in this chest the color of slow thunder from remembering young Duane, "but we worked things out. He gave us these guns."

From where she's helping Michonne carry the baby cot, Carol interjects, "You should have Hershel check that out, just in case," and Daryl nods in agreement. His own bandage is still peeking out at the base of his collar, a wound on his left shoulder where Rick's been stabbed in his right, and Rick wants to say, _hey, we're a matching pair_.

He manages to restrain the words and say, "Alright. But before that." Rick has become nervous all of a sudden, and he's still reprimanding himself as he tugs the crossbow from the depths of the trunk. It barely matters what Daryl's opinion of it is, except that's a hilarious, bald-faced lie.

Daryl's eyes widen, and he accepts the weapon with an appreciative "goddamn," lining up its sight and aiming at a walker through the fence, the flex of his biceps testing the crossbow's full weight.

Rick clears his throat. "So it's good?"

"It's a Stryker," Daryl stresses, livelier than Rick's ever seen him, "hardly used. S'better'n good."

Compared to Daryl's aged, battered one that has to be secured with a bag's strap, it's impeccable. Rick waits a beat before saying, "Good. Because that's yours."

And Daryl is looking at Rick like he's speaking in tongues, until it clicks into place for him and he inhales sharp enough to be audible. "You. You're serious?"

Rick grins, tells him, "No one knows how to use a crossbow the way you do. But even if they did, it'd still be yours."

Finally, _finally_, Daryl grins back, huge joyous light breaking on his face, as if this is better than his birthday and Christmas combined. Rick is bothered by the ruckus in his body at that: all the clues to what he's truly feeling are there but he doesn't want to put them together. It's like a protective measure, his mind shielding him.

Carl comes up to Daryl, poking him in the arm as he asks slyly, "Hey, now that you have this new one, does this mean I can have your old one?"

"No way, punk," Daryl snipes, but it's only for show, the corners of his mouth twitching, restless excitement buzzing through him. "Y'gotta know how to use it, first."

"Then you'll teach me, right?" Carl insists, relentless, and Daryl hums. "Maybe. Tomorrow. If it's okay with your pop." His gaze snags on Rick's and Rick is saying, "As long as you're both careful."

"Awesome!" Carl crows out in triumph, and Daryl puts a damper on that by flicking Carl's sheriff's hat off his head, then scarpering away before there are any attempts at retaliation. Rick has to chuckle at his son's offended scowl, and together they walk back to the rest of their family.

There's a storm that night, the kind that rattles the windows and agitates Judith, squirming unhappily in her crib. Rick stays up to watch her slumber, with every intention of scooping her up if she ever comes awake and cries, except he falls asleep too, and dreams of Daryl with rain in his hair, hypothermia-blue hands, shivering and leaving slippery winding paths on Rick's skin.

* * *

Four days later, Andrea comes back.

She's being escorted by a hulking black man with a twitching finger on the trigger of his H and H, introduced as Shumpert. Daryl's mouth curls into what might have been a smile or a sneer, or both. "I know you," he says. "You're the guy who punched me, stole my crossbow, and shipped me off to that arena."

Rick remembers that, far too well, and he studies Shumpert again. He's different away from the Governor's dictatorial grip, less a mindless following thug and more just a guy who doesn't talk much. Shumpert shrugs. "You conked me out and stole it back," he tells Daryl, his gaze staying professionally level.

Andrea sighs in a way that somehow shuts him up, and she glances from Daryl to Rick. "We're not here to bring up old grievances. We're here to safeguard our futures, both for you and for us."

They sit on the benches outside, and let Andrea lay out her grand plan for diplomacy: meeting in a feed store right between Woodbury and the prison, neutral ground.

"How can we be sure that this isn't a trick?" Glenn asks, voicing exactly what they all must be thinking.

"Both sides will have to trust the other to keep their word," Andrea insists. "Minimum backup, no ambush, no bullshit."

From behind him, Rick hears Daryl scoff a "yeah right," and can't help but feel the same. The Governor's the one who has tanks and a whole town behind him, while Rick's group has seven combat-ready people at most. Any treachery from Woodbury would be far more severe than anything they could commit.

But Andrea looks so tired, worn right down. Rick can't even begin to imagine what she must have had to do to convince the Governor to agree to this, so when she says, "Be there by noon tomorrow, okay?" he says yes.

Five minutes later, Shumpert is driving her away from them. "It's pretty obvious she would have said more but that goon was probably spying for the Governor," Glenn says once they're back inside, in a low tone sounding rather like shame. "Probably shouldn't have been so mad at her."

"So who're you bringing tomorrow?" Carl asks, Judith's head tucked against his shoulder, and Rick considers carefully before he speaks his mind.

"Daryl and Hershel are the only ones I can trust to keep a cool head about themselves when we're in the same space as that man. But that doesn't mean you won't be just standing around waiting on us here. They might try something while we're away, so the rest of you'll have to gear up, prepare for anything."

Hershel nods in concession, the answer having settled everyone enough that they don't protest against it, going back to loading ammo into their guns, but Merle hovers. "Like hell am I lettin you send my boy into that death trap," he snarls. "He ain't no killer. I oughta be the one layin out the welcome mat."

Rick reminds him forcefully, "You haven't earn my trust, anyone's trust, to do that. And you clearly don't know Daryl, since he's a lot tougher than you think."

Merle turns his head and spits through his teeth at the floor beside Rick, the closest he can get to punching Rick's nose into his skull. Behind him, Carl and Daryl are watching the animosity crackle between them, train-wreck fascination on their faces.

Rick feigns a civil smile, despising Merle more than a little bit, fellow concerned father that he may be. "I'll take watch for now," Rick announces to the room, and treads out. Each time he grows less and less tempted to raise his binoculars to stare at Lori's grave, and maybe soon he won't even miss it at all.

There are footsteps behind him and he thinks it's Carl again, except when he looks over his shoulder Daryl is the one approaching, his new crossbow strapped to his back and a primal, baser part of Rick is exhilarated by that, illogical as it may be.

Daryl catches Rick staring at the crossbow, but interprets it entirely wrong, thankfully, his rare master-of-the-universe grin surfacing as if to say, 'jealous of my new toy?' He's so young in that moment, though the moment evaporates soon enough. "Michonne said somethin about goin to the rendezvous point earlier than suggested, to scout it, check if it really ain't a trap."

"Yeah, that's good. We'll head out thirty minutes before."

Rick expects Daryl to take his leave after he's gotten approval for that plan, except he doesn't. He stares out into the broadfields, absent and forlorn. "She's worried for Andrea, y'know."

"We all are," Rick says, one eyebrow climbing high, but Daryl smirks.

"She's a lil more invested than that." He deflates like a doll with the stuffing punched out of it, looks down at his feet. "S'weird how they spent a whole winter together and she never figured out how hung up Michonne is on her."

A twinge goes through Rick, and he tightens his hand on the stock of his rifle. He looks at Daryl, wary and skittish, but Daryl's only squinting against the sun fallen cleanly gold on him, seventeen and beautiful in that singular way of his.

Rick examines the tight feeling in his heart, searching for a well-loved gash in Lori's name and finding something white and smooth like scar tissue instead. The earth jolts under his feet, the stars jerking hard to the side, and he has the most disorienting sensation careening through his mind, as if he's woken up able to remember everything but who he is.

"You gonna be alright out here?" Daryl asks, and Rick has trouble keeping up with the stuff between the stuff Daryl's saying out loud. He looks over at Daryl, and he's wearing a crooked, good-natured smile, waiting on a reply.

And Rick thinks in dismay, _you are everything i want._

* * *

Every day since the car in the rain has been a diabolical funhouse for Rick, traps and spooks and disfiguring mirrors, horrendous ideas of pulling Daryl's shirt over his head, undoing his fly and pushing a hand inside, and far worse besides. He conditioned himself to ignore this spastic lust in favor of cold facts: he had a duty to his wife and children, Daryl was underage, everyone would abhor it, Daryl's attraction was nothing more than rebellious experimentation that would go away and Rick's would do the same too.

Except it hasn't. And now it's mutated into something worse.

It's a fog that has taken over, rolled down from the hills to ground Rick's airplanes and sink his ships, a huge smothering thing.

In all the other areas of his life, Rick is rational and practical and honestly pretty bright, pretty much on top of things. Grief and rage and a coring desire for revenge let him get by just fine, helps keep his group safe.

Daryl shows up and it all goes to hell.

The two of them are each other's blind spot, each wreaking havoc upon the other without noticing, not until the damage is done. Daryl seems to have resigned to this magnetic pull, accepted it for what it is, not expecting anything of Rick. But Rick doesn't have the same fortitude as Daryl, doesn't know how long he can hold out against this.

He tries very hard not to put specific words to it, because he doesn't want to be Daryl's lover or god forbid his sugar daddy, and _family_ just sounds like backstory these days. Rick simply wants Daryl. He doesn't want to define it any better than that.

These days, Rick can only want the impossible.

* * *

Rick meets the Governor and forms one realization: he will have no regrets putting him down.

Phillip's one good eye is manic, it's insane. Anarchic and reckless and so vibrant Rick feels bad for the sky. In the midst of that casual charm, there is something broken loose in this man, violence, cruelty, exhilaration. Fear and arrogance, careening through, and Rick is astonished, not-just-a-little terrified.

That wild eye, like a dare too dangerous to turn down.

"I want Michonne," the Governor says. It's a precarious gambit, a half-truth at best. Rick knows that this man kills for killing's sake, and won't stop at just one of them. But the seed has been planted in his brain. He doesn't want any more blood on his hands than he already has.

Making it out into the bleached light is a mammoth accomplishment, as if he's climbed out of the deepest cave in existence, hand over hand. Rick fights the urge to shake himself, release half an hour's worth of pent-up shudders.

He's aptly distracted by the sight of Daryl and the Governor's second, Martinez, standing together, Daryl snickering at some terrible joke and Martinez pleased by it, a different kind of calculating respect in his eyes as he observes Daryl. They fly apart like shrapnel as soon as they realize the little meeting is over, and Daryl doesn't look at Rick when he hops onto his bike.

"What did he say?" Hershel asks, and Rick starts the car, turns them home.

"Let's wait until everyone can hear." A few paces ahead of them is Daryl, gliding on steel and chrome and an obnoxious gas tank, not looking any different. Nothing should be different. Yet Rick asks, as offhanded as he can manage, "What were those two talking about?"

Hershel knows right off the bat who Rick's talking about, and, luckily enough, doesn't question his motives. "They had to clear a few roamers, and must have decided to be civil with each other, like Milton and I did."

"Milton's that other one?" Rick wishes he doesn't sound so distracted. His face still feels too hot, a thin band of sweat at his hairline that can't be attributed entirely to the whiskey.

"Yes. None of them are all bad people, Rick. They just have a bad leader. Andrea and the rest of them, stuck with the Governor."

It's a sobering thought, those mothers with five-year-old clinging to their knees, men who've never killed another human being before this, no one quite understanding what's going on but being pulled along by this madman's whims. "It's him who's the real threat. To both sides."

_and it's this madman's whims that might just save us_, he thinks, unbidden, and he's stricken aghast by that. He shouldn't be even considering this, shouldn't be playing god like the Governor does. Rick rolls down his window and shoves down on the gas pedal, wanting that essential driving sense of having the whole world held in his hands, all of life once again at his command.

* * *

The inevitable fight breaks out the following day.

They're seated at different spots on the floor for lunch, Rick bottle-feeding Judith, when the shouting match reaches their ears. Rick's on his feet immediately, Carol and Glenn following in suit, and they wait for him to deposit his daughter in Hershel's arms before they head outside the block. No one is too keen on interrupting this feud alone.

"—yeah? Well, fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, you _fucking_ asshole." There's a rent-open pitch to Daryl's voice that Rick hasn't heard in a long time, the worst kind of pain underneath all that anger, and he dashes up to where Daryl has shoved at his father's shoulders, hard enough that Merle's back is flat against a wall.

Rick eases himself between them, trying to exude calm. He has a grounding hand around Daryl's elbow when Merle growls, "This ain't none a'your business, ya dirty pigs," his gaze fluid and unblinking, drinking in the spectacle of them and drinking something out of them, lessening them somehow.

"Don't talk to them like that!" Daryl yells, and Glenn is quick enough to grab him and hold him back, though he must be dying for Merle to get a black eye as much as Daryl is.

Carol's the one who gets to him, saying, disconsolate and tender, "He's not worth it, Daryl." Daryl's coaxed away easier after that. Merle doesn't move an inch, his duct-taped blade insurance enough against any sudden moves Rick might make. But he shouldn't worry about that.

Rick glances at the plate of canned corn that's been left on one of the tables, and says in disbelief, "He brings you food and you bring a fight. You're one of the few people I know who can spin gold into shit, Dixon."

Merle's lips curl back, the brightness in his eyes going sharp at the edges, almost neon in its intensity, but he doesn't rise to the bait, which is very much unlike him. Rick ponders on what to do, and decides quickly.

"Follow me." When Merle doesn't obey, Rick rests a pointed hand on his Python. "Don't make me ask twice."

Merle smirks. "That didn't sound like askin." But he makes a slow ascent up the steps Rick gestures at, and together they recede further into the structure in silence, until they hit Block A, the maximum security wing.

Rick had taken it upon himself to bring Merle's food, and now he drops it on the topmost rung of the stairs that he can reach. "Here. You owe Daryl an apology."

"An apology," Merle echoes in a discordant sneer. "I could shoot you an' gut you like the filth you are and you're worried 'bout that boy's feelings? He's that a good lay in the sack?"

For a second Rick's breath seizes in hysteria that Merle somehow knows about the incurable sickness in him, Merle _knows_, but then he properly processes the accusation. "You think I'd take advantage of him?" His throat closes up in utter fury. "You think I'd hurt him the way you do, taking out your own daddy issues on him?"

Merle's face twists up with terrible vengeance. "Fuck you," he screeches, a guttural glass-splitting sound as he advances with his knife pointed at Rick like an accusing finger. "You don't know horseshit about us. Don't look at me and pretend you know all the hells I've been through. He's my son."

The last statement is spoken in a decrepit hiss, water over the furnace of Merle's ire, somehow, as if this is the first time Merle has ever spoken these words aloud. His shoulders collapse and there's a life-changing grief lingering in his eyes. "God knows I tried to do my best with him. My son."

And Rick, against his better judgment, finds that he's sympathizing with Merle. "Then stop pushing him away, or you'll lose him," he says firmly. He's more alike with Daryl that way than he realizes, prickly just for show, and it's costing the both of them. "Trust me, I know."

Merle looks straight at Rick at last, gauging the sincerity in Rick's tone and nodding once, a brusque dismissal. Rick turns to leave without fear of getting a bullet in the back.

Carl is disassembling one of the glocks at a scrupulous pace on the stairs when Rick finds him, with Daryl lazing on the floor and remarking now and again, "you're doin that wrong," or "the firing pin's on the top," and Carl barking, "i know! quit being annoying."

Daryl chuckles and procures a hard candy to drop in Carl's lap as an olive branch, and Carl rolls his eyes at him but is smiling all the same. There's an odd tugging feeling in Rick's stomach from the sight, vaguely joyful and mostly afraid. And like he can feel Rick's eyes on him, Daryl lifts his head. The crash when their gazes come together bears all the earmarks of a sucker punch, but Rick somehow manages to smile, and watches, captivated, as Daryl smiles back.

* * *

**i managed to type this up in between the hassle of enrollment and the tedium of heartache. hurrah.**

**...things are gonna get real interesting these next few chapters, kids.**


	16. we were right about the stars

Daryl spends a good ten minutes stabbing the top of a can, cursing under his breath. Carl had misplaced their can opener, or more likely hidden it, just so Daryl's sweaty and miserable, stuck using his knife. It's with absolute relief that he dumps the corn onto a plate, and he samples a spoonful of it to make sure the corn really is sweet corn.

There's nothing on god's green earth that Merle loathes more than sweet corn.

Merle's whetting his knife when Daryl finds him on the cafeteria benches, and, as predicted, sniffs at the offered fine dining. "Sure you don't want it?" Daryl asks, simpering only a bit. Insignificant little victory, he thinks, since every other time it's Merle who employs every trick in the book to rag on Daryl, stupid bickering fights that acquire portentous resonance and depth now that civilization has ended.

Merle gestures to the spot in front of him with a jerk of his head, and Daryl sets the plate down, is half-turned to go except his father asks, "You gon' keep lyin to my face?"

Daryl stays still, doesn't move. "About what?"

"Your deal with Rick."

Daryl's already pretty good and goddamned sick of this conversation before it's even started. "Ain't none a'your damn business," he says shortly.

"Boy," and the way Merle says that word, how he always says that word like it's a crank in the small of Daryl's back that tightens every inch of his skin, "you tell me right now if he's tuned you into some fairy fuck 'cause so help me— "

That's nothing but harsh, spiteful, yet two can play at this game. "What if I am, then?" Daryl asks, and puts a cynical crimp of a grin on his face. "So what if I'm a huge fuckin queer? You gonna be disappointed in me? More'n you already are?"

Merle's temper skyrockets at once. "It's that filthy cunt's fault! Corruptin you all these months."

"Jesus christ." Daryl resists the melodramatic urge to fling his hands upwards in frustration. "Stop actin like I got no will of my own."

"You're a goddamn snot-nosed kid," Merle roars, and what's strange is that the sentiment is tinged remarkably with concern, but Daryl is too infuriated to care.

"Oh yeah?" He steps forward and shoves at Merle, taking petty glee in how he actually gets his father to stumble back. "Well, fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, you _fucking_ asshole." The effect of his anger is undermined by the splinter in his voice, close to tears, as is always the case when it comes to Merle.

Rick, Glenn, and Carol are the ones who pull them apart, and Daryl forces himself away from the scene, counting the steps he takes and the cracks on the floor and his slowing heartbeat, anything until he doesn't want to kill Merle anymore. "D'you hear everything?" he remembers to ask, already running dreaded scenarios through his mind, but Glenn shakes his head.

"Just the part about Merle being an asshole, which we already know," he says with a wry smile, and that surprises a laugh out of Daryl. Carl, intuiting Daryl's need for a distraction, waves a glock in hello. "Help me take this apart?" he asks, and they spend a good long while going through the gun's mechanisms, bound by the laws of boyhood to trash-talk each other the whole time.

Strange to recall that at the time they met, Carl would duck behind his mother's skirts at the first sign of trouble, oblivious to the concept of responsibility. Now he and Daryl are both a year older, a changed person living in the same skin, and, with any luck, all the wiser for it.

They'll need every bit of luck they can get.

* * *

Rick approaches Daryl just after they finish breakfast, grazing the back of Daryl's hand with his fingertips and whispering, "Meet me at the western guard tower." Daryl exhales, shivering in a way that he hopes doesn't show, and watches Rick talk to Hershel next. He's still rubbing at the soft rash of goose bumps Rick's touch left behind when he walks out into the yard.

His trepidations are only confirmed once the first thing Rick says is, "The Governor wants us to give up Michonne."

Hershel is hardly on board with this plan either, looking down at the ground in disappointed silence, then leaving the conversation as soon as possible. Rick sighs, and turns to Daryl. "We do this, we avoid a fight. No one else dies." Daryl's apprehensive of how Rick sounds, like he's trying to convince himself as well as Daryl.

"We need someone else," Rick adds, and the reason why he chose to tell Daryl and not Glenn reveals itself. Daryl nods along and offers to be the one to talk to Merle, or accompany Rick at least, but he's denied, and he can only speculate as to why that is.

He still looks for Merle later, and finds him slinking around the generator room. "Just lookin for a lil speed," he says when asked why he's down there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and proud of his addiction, his chosen insanity, and Daryl huffs. Merle always claimed that crystal meth was just a way to pass the time, but then he started doing more and more of it until he and Jess would have to drag him from whatever gutter he'd passed out in, deal with the fallout. Daryl won't do that anymore.

And like he knows what Daryl's thinking, Merle smirks his asinine smirk. "Yeah, yeah, shit mess my life up when everythin's goin so sweet, right?"

"You talk to Rick yet?" Daryl asks, cutting through the ramble.

"Yeah, oh yeah. I'm in." The syrupy tones of Merle's voice instantly rouse Daryl's suspicion. "But, uh, he ain't got the stomach for it. He's gonna buckle, you know that, right?"

Oh, he knows. Daryl's seen it happen, how Rick's hand falters seconds after his heart does, imploding too slowly for anyone to notice before it's too late. "If he does, he does."

Merle hums, not pleased with the ambiguous answer. "You want him to?"

Michonne's good people; Rick realizes that, they all do. But Daryl can only trust that Rick will make the right call for them, in the end. And so he says, "Whatever he says goes."

"Goddamn," Merle laughs. "D'you still even possess a pair of balls, boy? Are they even attached? I mean, if they are, they belong to you? You once called people like that sheep."

"No, _you_ did. What happened with you and Glenn, Maggie." Daryl can't even bring himself to finish, his throat thick with the injustice of Maggie's haunted eyes, how she still recoils if anyone moves towards her too fast.

Merle forms a half a sickly smile. "I done worse. You need t'grow up. Things are different now." His red-rimmed eyes are huge and gleaming strange. "Y'all people look at me like I'm the devil, grabbin up those lovebirds like that. Now y'all wanna do the same damn thing I did, snatch someone up and deliver 'em to the Governor, just like me. People do what they gotta do, or die."

Daryl shakes his head without thinking. "Can't do things without people anymore, Merle."

Looking down at his remaining hand like he's imagining blood on it already, Merle says lowly, "Maybe these people need somebody like me around, huh. Do their dirty work. The bad guy." He eyes his son with a cynical grin. "How does that hit ya?"

Daryl can't think of what comes next. Lost, he reaches for Merle's shoulder and takes hold, his grip sure. Merle tenses when Daryl's hand closes on his shoulder, but he's solid and doesn't move away. Daryl then hears these words leave him "I just. I just want a dad, is all."

Merle flinches, but stays quiet and unresponsive. And, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, Daryl withdraws from the room, grimacing face grey and deep-lined. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.

* * *

There are few things Daryl tries to avoid more than having to stand around waiting on something to do, since if his mind isn't occupied, it tends to wander. Right now, there's a low ache in Daryl's stomach, a sad and constant want.

When Rick first lodged under Daryl's ribs and inched his way deep, Daryl had spent a few weeks in denial, a few weeks frozen in panic, and then the entirety of the cold months adapting to it, because that's what you have to do to not go crazy, any time it gets harder because it always gets harder: make adjustments.

Daryl still remembers to be appalled by the course his life has taken, dull and colorless and fraught with nameless danger, and he knows it's because Rick means more to him than God ever intended, but what can you do. The damage has already been done.

These are thoughts that come from too far down inside, these things are too elemental and undiluted to be voiced by someone as immature, as flawed as Daryl. If he could, he'd abandon his lifetime of vigilance, nevermore swear on their group's safety, but instead live madly, corrupt and joyful and hopeless and never mind what it would do to Rick, never mind that. Daryl would take it all.

It's a terrible thing to know about himself.

Rick materializes out of the corner of Daryl's eye, seeming agitated. "It's off," he says briskly. "We'll take our chances."

The tension drains out of Daryl, and he gives a pleased nod. "I'm not sayin it was the wrong call, but this is definitely the right one." Yet Rick's hardly listening, turning this way and that, more than troubled. "What's wrong?"

"I can't find Merle or Michonne, they've gone."

Daryl leads Rick to the generator room and there it's confirmed: the stubborn old man went ahead with the plan anyway. "Damn it," Rick breathes. "I'm going after him."

"You can't track for shit," Daryl grouses, remembering a whole afternoon trying to explain the intricacies of trails and drag marks and Rick's plain befuddled face during the course of it. He looks up from the sackcloth in his hand, sees Rick tear an exasperated hand through his hair. "Then the both of us," he says.

"No, just me," Daryl insists, a mirrored echo of their previous situation. "I said I'd go and I'll go. Plus they're gonna come back here. You gotta be ready."

His back is already against the exit door, his hand around the knob when Rick lunges, his hands locking around the back of Daryl's neck, his hip. Daryl jolts in place, his nose brushing Rick's chin. It's nothing new, the expression on Rick's face, sincerity and worry and protectiveness, just multiplied a thousand times and now Daryl sees it for what it was, what Rick kept banked back as far as he could, and it's a fresh, exhilarating burn.

"As long as you come back." Rick presses forward until Daryl can feel the older man against him from shoulder to knee, long solid planes of his body shifting as Daryl shifts, keeping up with him. "Rick," he manages, hoarse, and Rick shuts his eyes like he's in pain, presses his forehead to Daryl's.

"Stay alive and come back," he rasps, and Daryl utters a choked sound, fingers desperate on the hinge of Rick's jaw. They must have stayed tangled that way for only moments, but it feels like a century has passed once they do part. Nothing is left of Daryl but bones and numbness when he finally makes it outside. The light and the trees and the walkers are too much, a blinding overexposure. Rick's rough voice rings in his head, the warmth of Rick's skin under his hand. There is a terrifying joy building in Daryl's chest, and some ten miles away his father is nosediving into a death trap.

He takes a deep breath, and starts running, road dust on his teeth and the perilous day rushing up to meet him.

* * *

Daryl doesn't know how he managed to get himself back.

The car Merle used to ambush the Governor runs out of gas at some point, and he staggers out of it, keeps on walking. A dragging slog buried deep in his bones, his eyes still stinging from the smoke of his father's funeral pyre, and he wants to lie down and never get back up again. But he keeps on walking.

It's late afternoon when the guard towers loom up, roamers few and far in between the fields he goes through, hardly even noticing he's there. The yard ahead becomes an angered beehive, people banging and making a racket to distract the odd walker that does get wind of him.

Rick's the one who pulls open the gate and catches his lurch forward, slinging an arm around Daryl's hips, holding him up. Daryl remembers, suddenly and starkly, falling asleep on someone's couch when he was eleven or twelve and waking up with Merle blanketing him, the simple weight of a chest rising and falling against his own. That nearly gets him crying again, except he's too exhausted to do anything but.

"Where's Merle?" Carl asks, and Daryl doesn't reply, can't. Carol breathes out a despondent "oh no," and Rick's fingers tighten on the shell of Daryl's hip. "Let's get you inside," Rick says, maddeningly gentle.

Hershel and Beth bring meat loaf to Daryl's cell, trying to coax him into eating, though they leave when he doesn't move an inch from his bunk. Carol sits at his feet and informs him of the bump on the back of Michonne's head, the only wound she sustained. "She's here, we're all still here because of Merle," she says, and it's meant to be a comfort, a kindness, but the only things left in him are wrack and ruin. There's nothing left to save.

Rick is the one who puts his foot down. "Don't make me have to force that food down your throat," he says as he sits on the desk in the cell, not so stern as much as weary, and Daryl wants to rage, scream. Instead he sits up and starts chewing little sullen mouthfuls. It turns out he's hungry after all, but he doesn't want to give Rick the satisfaction of being right, and keeps at it until he finishes everything off the plate.

As expected, Rick doesn't leave immediately after he's done. He takes the utensils and sets them on the desk, not meeting Daryl's eye. What he doesn't expect Rick to say is, "It's my fault."

Daryl frowns, and Rick continues, halting and strained like he never is, "I told him, after you fought, that he should stop pushing you away. Start protecting you like a father should. I goaded him. Pushed him. I should never have even considered that deal. I put so many of us in danger." He scrubs at his face with a hand, says with his voice threadbare, "It's my fault he's dead."

A few heartbeats of silence pass, and then Daryl snorts. "Bullshit."

Rick's head jerks up like it's on the end of a string, his gaze thinned and glittering on Daryl, the full brunt of his focus making Daryl kinda nuts. He pushes it out: "Ain't nobody can kill Merle but Merle. He chose how he wanted t'go. Not you or Michonne or God could ever —" He blinks fast, looks down at his feet, the hole in his sock and two toes showing. "He chose bein a fuckin idiot."

"He chose you," Rick corrects Daryl, coming over to sit beside him in a rustle, gripping Daryl's knee. "He wasn't thinking of anyone but you."

Daryl gives a deep shuddering sigh, slumping against Rick, legs and shoulders pressing together. Rick's head is docked against Daryl's, holding each other up. And Daryl goes abruptly hot under his skin, because just this morning Rick had cradled him close, held him and _looked_ at him like he meant something, and a flick of his eyes upward helps him confirm it: this isn't a fluke. This is real.

And because Rick knows what he's thinking, knows Daryl better than previously realized, he tilts the rest of the way in and fits his mouth to Daryl's in a kiss, they're kissing right now.

It's not their first, but it's so much better. Daryl lets out a shaky breath he didn't know he was holding, a low sound from his chest, and licks at the seam of Rick's lips. The sensation of them voluntarily parting this time makes Daryl's astounded stomach curl and heat up.

Rick's hand slides up from Daryl's knee to itch at Daryl's waist, and Daryl has to drop his head onto Rick's shoulder, giddy and panting.

"Okay?" Rick asks unevenly, petting Daryl's side. He sounds so astonished. Daryl wipes the wetness in his eyes on Rick's shirt, and tells him, more honest than he's ever been, "Yeah. Yeah, I'm good."

The night is silent but for the slow mournful whine of the breeze against concrete, the shuffles and murmurs of the rest of their group. "Carl's gonna miss ya," Daryl says, leaning a few crucial inches back, watching Rick openly because he must be allowed to now.

Rick swallows with a click, already shaking his head. "He's mad at me. For not telling him about the deal. Everyone is, really. But they're trying to forgive me while he's." He cuts himself off with a sigh. "And we've never really even had the chance to talk about —"

"Lori?" Daryl finishes quietly.

"Yeah." Rick's twisting his wedding band as though he's not conscious of it, the glaring reminder that he once had a wife. "We should, we ought to be talking about that too."

"Jesus, y'think?" Daryl growls. He feels like he's being hit by a two-by-four, right across his spine. "What, now that she's dead an' gone, now I can move in? As a substitute?"

Rick blanches, stricken. "No," he says firmly, taking both of Daryl's hands though Daryl tries to slip free. "Please listen. I miss her for what she means to my children, for them not having a mother. We grew cold towards each other in the end, too cold. That's the only thing I regret." He sounds so beseeching, his eyes huge and earnest. "The _only_ thing."

Despite himself, Daryl starts lowering his guard. "I, I wanna believe you." He can't express how much he wants that, how much he wants to ride off into the fucking sunset without a hitch, except. They could die tomorrow, if things go south. And a niggling voice in the back of his head that sounds too much like his dead father is sneering, _he couldn't possibly want_ you, _boy_.

To Daryl's bafflement, Rick smiles, somber and sweet. "Then I just have to convince you, however long that takes."

Rick's thumbs are passing back and forth over Daryl's knuckles, Daryl's mouth gone dry and his mind spinning, a thousand possible timelines flickering past. "What." He stumbles and starts over, hating how all his rationale seems to have been lopped off. "What is this that we've even started, anyway."

The smile that overtakes Rick's face now is as nervously eager as the churning mixture of Daryl's insides. "Only what the both of us decide it should be. We'll figure it out as we go along. Together." He emphasizes this last word by squeezing Daryl's fingers, and Daryl squeezes back.

"Now get some sleep." Rick moves to stand, though he hasn't let go of Daryl yet. "We're up at first light."

"You gon' tell me the plan, at least?" Daryl meant to sound jesting, though his voice goes oddly deeper at the end, and Rick pushes out his lower lip with his teeth in a way that makes Daryl think he should use that voice more often. Preferably in a more risqué scenario.

Rick smiles again. "Tomorrow," and that sounds heftier than it should be, a promise they both should keep. He visibly hesitates, then ducks to press a parting kiss to the corner of Daryl's mouth before he leaves.

"Tomorrow," Rick had said, and Daryl lets that play in his head over and over again until he drifts off, trying to engrave it on his mind until it's shining, a city of gold in his future.

* * *

***pops champagne***


	17. interlude iv: paint the all unutterable

**man, you guys. somehow i've become editor in chief of our college paper and might not be able to balance doing that with writing this story. i do promise that whenever i get both the time and the drive, i'ma plot out the ideas clamoring in my skull.**

* * *

It's midday, and the sun sticks to Michonne's pores, thick as wool. Turns the air moted too, tinned gold, wavering before her face as she wills her legs to move. The back of her skull throbs with every step, jarring Merle's pistol-whip. Everything's fuzzy, like she hasn't slept in days. But she makes the journey back on foot, sticks to the treeline until the west side of the prison rises up and she stands in its twenty-foot-long shadow. Drab and condemned as it is, she's come back to it.

She has yet to pinpoint exactly why.

Rick runs out to meet her, asking, "You okay?" as he tugs open the gate. Michonne eyes her blade, still slick with black walker blood, and idly contemplates the question, its depth beyond the immediate concern.

"Head hurts," she settles for, and Rick nods, tight-lipped.

"Get to Hershel for that." His clawed-out eyes, the scuffed edges of his voice accompany his next query: "Did you see Daryl?"

Michonne can still recall the angry brace of Daryl's body, his terse _you kill him?_ and his arm ready to lift his crossbow and shoot. "Merle let me go. Daryl said not to let anyone come after him."

Rick's whole form sharpens, and he snarls, "Like hell," already striding to where the cars are parked across the open lot.

_he woulda blinked_, Merle had said of the man, stolen katana swinging close to his hip instead of hanging off his back, as it should have been. _he woulda weaseled outta the deal and then we'd all be blown sky-high. _But it's what they've both done, and for the same reason: to protect the family they had in common.

"Don't," Michonne snaps, hurrying after him. "We have no way of knowing what's happening. If Merle launched a solo mission and failed, the Governor might come knocking sooner rather than later."

Rick must be dying from the dilemma, face twisted up from it and his hand refusing to let go of the Honda's handle. At length he finds it in himself to move away. "I'll find Carol and the others, have them go up the towers." The hectic gleam in his eyes has dimmed somewhat when he glances at her, and he nods one last time. "Go and rest."

Hershel's face locks down when Michonne informs him of the situation, though he has her lie back down on the bunk, his hands gentle as he assesses the damage and asks the necessary probing questions that medics do. "It'll be alright if you sleep, you don't have a concussion. It'll be that fatigue that can do you in." He grabs his crutches to stand and smiles, flickering bright. "I'm glad you're back with us."

Outside the cell, Beth smiles at Michonne the same way her father does, the baby she carries deep in another unwitting slumber. Michonne can't look at them for too long without thinking of her own little boy, and her hand flies to the golden pendant around her throat, the one tangible remembrance of Andre she will ever have in this life.

It was easier to tamp down the suffocating loss, to live in perpetual denial, when there was no one to say you were crazy. Michonne knew how ridiculous it was when she would hold conversations with Mike in her head. This Mike would be alive and whole, not the armless shell standing guard over her from the sprawling night.

Then Andrea came, with what they had blossoming from necessity and symbiosis into something else. And now these people, with enough ripped-open places in their hearts to match her own. She sees Carol smooth a hand down Carl's hair and recognizes a fellow grieving mother. She's no longer the only one who's lost something. It's a terrible responsibility that everyone carries around, these days.

Rick's eyes are more blue than red, today, and they meet Michonne's readily, relaxed now that they have a solid plan, now that everyone's safety is a guarantee. "Ready?" he asks as he descends from the second floor, and Michonne dips her head in assent.

"The deal the Governor offered you about me," she says, and Rick hesitates at the bottom of the stairs, his expression balling up, but she continues, "You had to think about it. You had to. I get it."

Rick lifts his gaze and keeps it level, at the very least, contrition-rife when he tells her, "I'm sorry. I came real close."

"But you didn't," Michonne reminds him, and he nods too many times, something else eating at his conscience. "I never apologized to you, did I," he says not three seconds later. "For being so harsh with you when we met."

_harsh_ doesn't begin to cut the killer grip over her gunshot wound, the weapons shoved in her face; suspicion and worry over their own people took precedence over charm, such a far cry from the Governor's reptilian ways that looking back on it, she doesn't begrudge them for that now. "Well, I never thanked you," she says, echoing his sentiment, "for getting me out there that day, taking me in. So we're square."

The smile they share in that moment, muted as it is, looks to be the first of many.

Somehow, the plan works. Woodbury tucks tail and flees, and there's no glory to it, no relief. This was no Homeric battle, just a mad scramble in the dark. Only three of them opt to continue their strike, but Michonne still likes her chances with Rick, with Daryl.

And then they see the massacre on the highway, with the sole survivor saying when asked about Andrea, "We thought she was with you. Tyreese said she slipped away and went to the prison."

"No, she didn't," Michonne growls, something fracturing like ice in her chest, and dreaded images keep flooding her mind when they come to the holding areas, to the pool of blood crawling towards them from under the galvanized iron door.

"Will you open it?" she asks Rick, hating the tremors wracking through her voice. To her surprise it's Daryl, the boy who lost his father just yesterday, who steels his shoulders, raises his rifle at the same time he nods at Rick to count down.

Andrea is alive, still alive and Michonne goes blank with joy. But then she sees the sheen of sweat on Andrea's flushed skin, the glossy fever in her eyes, and already she knows they're out of time.

Without quite realizing what she's doing, Michonne leans in, strokes Andrea's matted hair. She starts sobbing, shards of her heart puncturing her lungs that somehow don't produce a sound, because Andrea is dying and all she can think about is the rest of her people. _Their_ people.

"It's good you found them," she says, looking from Michonne to Daryl, beatific, at peace. "No one can make it alone now."

Daryl, crouched on the dirty floor beside Rick, reaches out to take Andrea's hand. "I never could," he says, roughly honest.

It isn't a sweet or pretty end. It's powdered glass replacing Michonne's blood, her molecules constricting as Rick shapes Andrea's fingers around a gun. It's finding the fortitude to stay even as Daryl and Rick depart, to watch the best thing that's ever happened to her in this wreck of a new world fall away, fizzle out of existence.

"I love you, Michonne," Andrea tells her, the hand she's placed on Michonne's face too warm, a fire lit under her skin. "Take care of yourself. Take care of each other."

Michonne grasps tightly at the hand resting on her cheek, blinks away the tears that refuse to stop. "I will. I. I love you too," she says, the first time she's said the words since she tucked Andre in bed and kissed Mike.

She's terrified that after this, she won't ever be able to say them again.

Andrea lifts the gun, shivering in her weakened hand, and lets the barrel slide between her teeth, closes her eyes. The shot explodes, the reverberating force of the noise sending Michonne sprawling, a hollow ringing on the heels of the slicing pain through her ears.

For a long time, she stays with her hands covering her face, hiding from the sight of Andrea slumped and motionless, the gun still smoking in her grip. She reaches for it and flicks the safety off once she can, and stands to pull open the door.

Rick and Daryl stand close together, forearms touching. Daryl's shoulders curve under an invisible weight, his bowed head of hair a messy Michelangelo halo in the crude overhead light. Rick squeezes Daryl's wrist once in reassurance, then holds out a folded bed sheet to Michonne.

"Let's bring her home."

They bury Andrea beside Lori's marker once their new tenants help them clear the prison's fields, replace the gates that the Governor destroyed. Hershel reads a passage from the Bible that is unfamiliar, hence comforting. Long after the others leave in twos, Michonne is left by the grave, Daryl at her side.

"She was my first friend," Daryl says to the ground, toneless reflex. His fingers patter helplessly on the strap of the crossbow Rick gave him. "My _only_ friend, for a while."

Michonne doesn't know what to reply. She'd say that she feels the same way, except Andrea was more than that to her. Sorrow and anger and regret thrumming together, because they weren't all the way gone on each other, but they might have been, if they were just given the chance.

Instead, so something other than grief occupies the gaping maw of her ribcage, she says, "She was proud of you. Your father, too."

Daryl brays out a wild little laugh, sounding a bit hysterical. "That s'posed to be code for somethin or what?"

Touching the skewed pegs of the cobbled-together cross heading Andrea's grave, Michonne decides not to meet his gaze, giving his grief what little privacy she can. "He was ready to die for you. It's what he did, though he didn't want to. He thought he had to. Because he wanted you to know he loved you."

"Then why didn't that fucker tell me himself?" Daryl spits, the words shuddering.

Michonne does look at him this time, at his narrowed downcast eyes, his tightened mouth, and tells him calmly, "You might have not believed him otherwise."

That gets Daryl crying, crying like he can wash himself clean this way, scalding wetness that reddens his face, and Michonne lets him be. Weak sunlight is filtering through the clouds, brightening the sky. Morning has finally come.


	18. swimming in glue

In the forty-two hours that pass before Rick gets to catch Daryl alone again, he has time to think things through.

It's an exhaustive effort. He has to put into account their new next-door neighbors, the responsibility they have over this prison, the joint crusade Michonne and Daryl want to take up against the Governor, his son's frigid withdrawal.

_Christ_, his son.

His sheriff's deputy badge has been molded to Rick's palm for a while now, seven precise points of burning chastisement. Here in the east guard tower he can see how Glenn and Sasha are taking down walkers through the fences, to keep attention off Maggie and Karen as they reattach the hinges on the inner gate. Tomorrow the damaged main gate will be replaced, and they can start dragging out the bodies, if they don't get stuck in the mud the sudden deluge caused last night, the sky's one last hurrah before summer kicks into high gear.

The boy Carl gunned down will be left to rot in the forest, nameless and forgotten. Or maybe there's a man, woman, little girl, in the cell block across theirs, wondering why they can't find their family among those slaughtered on the highway, can't bring him to rest.

Their fate is as inconstant as the weather. They're at the mercy of the wind, and Rick can't tell where they will end up, his son most of all. Carl is the soaked sapling trembling against the hard elements, the immense shattering fall of thunder.

Muffled steps up the guard tower and the metal groan of the hatch has Rick turning around, and Daryl's head emerges, an unruly piece of sun. "Carol said I'd find you here," Daryl says, hoisting his rifle onto the floor first, then himself. Rick reaches to pull Daryl up, and stays holding Daryl's arm longer than he has to, Daryl's brightening from the contact a great comfort.

Rick hisses and rubs at his palm as the feeling rushes back to it, and startles when Daryl reaches for his hand, gently pressing down on the star the badge had embossed. "He gave it back," he says, phrasing it as both a statement and a question, and Rick nods, looks away because his heart is struggling not to sink into his shoes.

"He's slipping away from me," Rick hears himself saying, immense inchoate love quivering in his throat. "He hates me."

"Naw, man," Daryl sighs, clutching Rick's hand tighter. "He's your kid. Just gotta talk to 'im, really talk."

The gate has been repaired and their people withdraw from it, start taking down the walkers that have piled up against the chain link. Rick's body loses some of its tension, though his speech is still thick when he admits, "I'm scared he won't care about what I have to say."

Daryl shrugs. "At least you tell him. Y'got time for that now, remember?"

"That we do." Rick dares himself to use the collective term, for more than one purpose, brought on by the solid press of Daryl against his shoulder, this sneaking rush of anticipation growing in him like the shadow of a tidal wave. And mercy of mercies, that gets Daryl to smile.

Daryl might not trust what they now have, not all the way, but he's trying. Rick figures that if he can just keep showing his face every single day, turning up like a bad penny on Daryl's doorstep, following him around wherever he goes—it'll get through to him eventually.

Except that can't happen if Daryl's going to keep taking off.

"About you and Michonne wanting to go after him," Rick starts, and already Daryl is frowning, his face closing off, but Rick follows through. "I get that you want to. You have to. But you need to help us rebuild. What if something happens to you, or her, and you come back and things have gone to shit here too? Once everything's stabilized, you." His voice gives a little and he winces, not liking the sound of it. "You can go."

Shrugging again, and Daryl scoffs, "We're only leavin for a few days, not a few years," a joking contemplative tilt to it, but the war's already won.

It will be alright, Rick thinks as he clambers down the stairs, the badge and Daryl's smile tucked close to his chest. It might take weeks to right everything gone askew, maybe even months, but they have time now, so much of it that Rick's head spins. Calendar pages snow down in his mind, burying them like an avalanche, and somewhere in there is the day that Carl will let him in again, and they'll be okay then.

* * *

The grocery store is banked in shadow, counting on the sun to bleed through the doors and the dust-caked windows for them to see. Sasha, who had been quiet for most of the trip, laughs in triumph when she finds two pack of Starbursts. "Blackmail material for Ty," she says when Rick asks her to explain, fervor toned down but still very much there. "He loves the yellow ones."

Rick grins. He's relieved that she and her brother took their offer to occupy the remaining cells in C block, to demonstrate goodwill. He still feels like he's making amends for the gun he shoved at them, during that despairing blackout period, but with all the runs they've now gone on together, the camaraderie feels less forced each new time.

It's Glenn who hears the screams first.

"_Maggie_," is all Rick hears fly out of Glenn's mouth before he's gunning for the entrance, towards the direction the ruckus came from. Rick has to yell for Sasha to bring the supplies and wait in the car, get ready for an immediate takeoff.

Some forty feet away, Rick turns a bend in the neighborhood and collides into Maggie, perfectly alright. "We have to help," she insists after she's hugged Glenn tight, pointing towards a dollar store with seven walkers scratching against the doorway, someone's shouting and sobbing from inside still audible above the din.

Though they act as fast as they can, taking down every threat, the man lying on the store's floor is bleeding out from the deep gouges on his shoulder and arm. "Please, Caleb," he whimpers to his companion, pawing at the floor in wretched spasms. The one called Caleb is sniffling as he draws his knife, but his nut-brown stare has become resolute.

"You don't have to do that," Maggie starts, but Caleb ignores her. He tenderly turns the man's head away, his dark hair flopping in his face, and buries the blade in the back of his skull, slides the unseeing green eyes shut afterwards.

Rick averts his gaze to find his arm bleeding from when he cut it on the shards of window glass, prickling under his nerves. The man rises to his feet and gestures to the wound, offering with his throat roughened down to almost nothing, "I can take a look at that." He glances at the body of his companion, sighs. "It'll help me take my mind off. Off things. It's the least I can do."

Caleb Subramanian has a PhD in immunology and a complete medical kit in his backpack. When Glenn asks if he's ever had to put someone down before, the reply is flat, shaky.

"Never did that when they were still alive, when they could still feel it. I just. I didn't want Ernie to suffer."

Rick stays silent, deliberating, then he asks the last question. "Do you want to come with us, Caleb?"

Caleb tapes the gauze to Rick's wound and shows half a smile. "If it's okay with you guys, yes. But I'd rather you call me Dr. S. It's what they used to call me."

* * *

Two months in and the questions asked of the souls they stumble across are pared down to three pointed turns of phrase: how many walkers have you killed, how many people, why. Rick's not going to leave people alone like what he did to the hiker on that road not too long ago, not anymore.

It's Ryan's idea to put up a dining pavilion so they can cook outside, and Julio's to start a school for the children. Becky starts maintaining the generators so they can use the lights every once in a while. Everyone's stepping up to bring these ideas to fruition, and Rick still stares in wonderment at the community they've built, the electric pulses of lives sparking each other for the better.

Michonne and Daryl take their lead and start bringing back others too. Daryl calls them strays, rolls his eyes when Michonne thwaps him for using that term. "Strays are good," he explains to Rick one night. "Tough. They seen a lot."

They're sitting on the steps outside their block as Daryl eats, the thousands of strewn-salt stars above them catching in his hair, his irises. There's a new scar healing on his face, thin pink-white stroke breaking the scruff on his chin. Rick likes to think that he can look as much as he wants without being ashamed, to save up every moment as a still frame for the days when Daryl has to leave again.

"You still haven't found him," he says, skirting the topic, and Daryl grunts, sets his plate behind him on the concrete, wiping his fingers on his jeans.

"We're headin further south. Though at this point we're gonna hit the tropics instead o'that goddamn Governor."

Rick drinks in the creases in Daryl's forehead, the way his lips are screwed in a knot. "Have you considered stopping?"

Daryl doesn't answer, leaning back on his hands, stretching his legs out further. "He won't come back, not for a long time. Maybe not ever," Rick amends, searching for a telltale hunch of Daryl's brows, some shadow of a doubt. But Daryl is impassive, jaw moving slightly; he's chewing on the inside of his lip.

"But it could happen," Daryl says, scowling at nothing in particular, stuck in the thought-memory of what carnage one charming psycho can unleash. "Can't take that chance."

Rick takes care with each word when he tells the sky, "I'd rather you both were in here more, instead of out there all the time." He looks over to see Daryl, watchful and incisive under half-closed eyelids, something moving heavy and slow across his expression.

"Though y'got used to that," Daryl says, straightening up from his morose sprawl, leaning in a lot closer than he needs to.

Rick reaches his hand out, hovering near Daryl's hip. "Living with it, with the long wait, until I see you come back here alright. That's a different story." This must have been how Lori felt whenever he went out into the line of duty, like getting caught in a bear trap, smashed-chest, frozen dry-eyed, everything whited out except for the anxiety.

Daryl observes Rick's hand move over his body without touching him, seeming fascinated. Rick can't breathe for this dense cloud gathering around them, thick in the pockets of space, sparkling with spare electrons.

"Carl is better now," he informs Daryl, fingertips alighting on the indentation at the inside of Daryl's elbow. "We talked, like you said we should."

"That's good," Daryl murmurs, mouth quirked like he's thinking about smiling, and it truly is good. Carl still broods and keeps his conversations with his father monosyllabic, cutting a lonesome figure against the open grounds away from the other kids. But he does tell Rick of the erratic horror dreams, the skew and illogic of thunderous blood and trauma, haunted by the life he took. _is this how you felt after shane_, he asked once, eyes glimmering with unshed tears, and Rick had to gather his boy close and comfort him. He didn't speak of how he has his own sleepless nights too.

But in the here and now, with Daryl's breaths fanning his cheek and the moon in Rick's lungs, it all becomes more tolerable.

Daryl swallows and cinches a hand around Rick's wrist, presses a kiss to Rick's cheekbone, reckless and hot with a promise of teeth, and then gone much too quick. "Can't speak for Mich, but I guess I can stay back, every now and then," he says instead, and Rick must be grinning too wide for his face, but he doesn't care. The darkness is blanketing this quiet moment for them, they can hide what they choose to keep to themselves.

* * *

"Dad. _Dad_."

Rick comes halfway awake, tenses to catch Carl's arm before he can keep shaking Rick's shoulder again, a pretty neat trick. "Everything okay?" he asks without opening his eyes.

Carl exhales in an uncertain, heavy manner that ensnares Rick's attention completely. "What happened?" he barks, pushing up and over his bunk to reach for his boots, tug them on his feet.

"They're back, but. They're hurt."

It's a fresh piece of hell, those ten seconds he has to walk to check on them. It's an inevitable side effect of their life that Rick's mind flies heedlessly, mercilessly, to the darkest of scenarios, except both Michonne and Daryl are on their feet, still breathing. The level of relief that floods through Rick at the sight of their bruises, their limps into their cell block, has to be some kind of fucked up.

Dr. S gets Michonne flat on her back on the lower bunk in her cell, finds a cracked rib that makes her hiss like fire between her teeth. "We got cornered," she tells Rick in between wincing gasps, "had to jump from a high way up. Miscalculated. My goddamn fault."

"Hey, don't take all the credit," Daryl says on the stairs, glaring at her intractable and gruff the way he always gets when he's in pain, swatting away Hershel's attempts at looking him over. Rick may be no expert but he can see the unnaturally crooked slant of Daryl's fingers on his left hand, the tense shape of his split lip.

Rick doesn't berate him for that because it never does any good, getting mad at Daryl. Instead he goes about it firm, straightforward, the only things Daryl can appreciate right now. "It doesn't matter whose fault it is." Rick gets a hold on Daryl's arm, the one not graffitied with blood. "You got each other back here safe. You did good."

Daryl's eyes jerk up, arresting on Rick's with narrow intent, but the long hours and miles of the day settle on his shoulders, and he finally concedes to Hershel doing his work. "Ain't such a big deal," he mutters.

Hershel aims a bemused look at Rick as he sits opposite Daryl on the stairs. "Of course it isn't."

Each bone in Daryl's middle and ring fingers has been broken perfectly in half, gone twilight shades of crimson and indigo. Daryl keeps swearing a blue streak under his breath while Hershel wipes the fingers clean and fits some splints in place, wraps the fingers separately and then together. Rick can't stand idly by for that, distracts himself by wetting a handkerchief with his water bottle and handing it to Daryl. He would clean off the grime on Daryl's skin himself, except there's no way of knowing how the others would take that. Daryl fumbles at the cloth, scrubbing the mess away.

Dr. S shakes out two pills of Vicodin from the bottle and gives them to Daryl, who snatches them up with his good hand, dry-swallows with a grimace crimping his face. "At least I won't have a bitch of a time jerkin off, huh, doc?" he jests.

Though Dr. S chortles at the harmless little dirty joke, Rick's socked full in the belly by a wave of desire as visceral as a gunshot wound, remembering that damning night of Daryl moaning Rick's name in his sleep. He has to compose himself by watching Michonne struggling to sit up and take her own painkillers, Carl taking Judith from Beth.

There's no room for trifles like lust right now.

* * *

Around lunchtime, Rick comes to Daryl's cell with a can of lukewarm juice and a disheveled bag of Doritos. Daryl has somehow managed to rid himself of his shoes and filthy top layers, stuck in jeans and a thin sleeveless undershirt. The road rash along his left side has darkened into a photo negative, but he grins like a loon once he sees Rick, so the pills must have already taken effect. "Ain'tcha supposed to be feedin healthy shit to battered patients?" he asks.

Rick allows a beatific smile in return. "What happened to 'eat anything that's edible'?" he counters, placing the food beside Daryl on his bunk.

Daryl huffs but bites the edge of the chips' wrapper anyway, strips it back with his teeth. "Stay a while," he mumbles with the shiny red plastic still caught in his mouth. "This flavor is the fuckin bomb."

There's nothing quite as corrupting as Daryl when he gets like this, the opiate-softened, sugar-sweetened version of him that Rick's only now been able to appreciate up close. Together they eat the chips that have been crushed into smaller, senseless shells. At some point, Daryl pulls a leg up to fold it under himself, and Rick becomes terribly cognizant of Daryl's knee against his own leg, a circle of heat that he should shift away from.

But Daryl's eyes are wide and beaming, the white midday light soaking in. And so goddamn warm, cotton and summer rolled up into one.

"You doing alright?" Rick asks as he stands to go. Daryl swigs from his juice can, throat working hungrily through it. He gives Rick a deformed thumbs-up with his splintered hand once he's done.

"Yeah," he says, strange underground pitch to it that transfixes Rick, enough that he's still staring at Daryl when the younger man starts licking at the powder on his fingers.

Rick shivers, tidal static rushing in his ears, his skin fevering quickly. The blacks of Daryl's pupils have swallowed up the blue, and not just from the drugs. His fingers leave his mouth with a soft pop, and then he's standing up to lean into Rick. "Hey," he whispers against Rick's lips, right before kissing him.

The kiss tastes of orange juice, artificial flavoring, and Rick falls into it so fast. He feels Daryl's sticky uninjured hand slide up under his button-down, Daryl's calluses skating across the skin of his back, and Rick moans.

He sweeps his hands through Daryl's hair, positioning his head at a good angle, sinking against him and Daryl is sucking on his tongue. Rick's mind is shocked speechless, the surface of his skin tingling and alight, muscles underneath jumping with glee from Daryl's touch. Rick can't help it, can't stand it, and his hips thrust forward, their belt buckles clinking, a groan vibrating between them, and that's across some line because that gets him to break them apart.

Daryl sways drunkenly, equilibrium shot, and Rick has to guide him onto the bed again. He blinks up at Rick, so confused, so young. "Why'd y'stop?" he asks, miserable. "Don't. Y' don'wanna kiss me?"

On the contrary. Rick wants to kiss Daryl all the time, impart savage life-or-death kisses that can't be turned back from. But Daryl's seventeen, and under the influence of potent drugs, which is just a recipe for disaster, right now.

It's always there, this constant thought, a buzzing fearful drone that rises to near hysteria, making Rick frantic with it: is he ready for this? Not even trusting himself, the second question: are the both of us ready for this?

Not wanting to end this encounter on a sour note, Rick bends down to kiss Daryl's forehead, and say, "Get some sleep. We'll talk when you're feeling better."

Daryl yawns and nods, eyelids already drifting shut. Rick touches Daryl's back, the place at the nape of his neck where sweat has dampened his hair and made it feel like suede.

He takes a stabilizing breath, and leaves. The picture of Daryl lying on his side, arms wrapped protectively around his chest, follows Rick all the way.


	19. laugh, and swing the axe

**I'M SO SORRY IT TOOK ME TWO MONTHS TO UPDATE THIS, GUYS. real life kept shitting on me, but i'm back in business now.**

**warning for dubious consent, in that a seventeen year old initiates a sexual act that both parties concerned are more than willing to have, but the adult in the situation does next to nothing in stopping. (tho what the hell else are you guys here for anyway)**

* * *

Daryl wakes up in the remains of a carnival ride.

He knows that, recognizes the broken flags, the skeletal rides rotting slowly in the horizon of a rural night. There's no need for fancy words now: he feels like he got hit by a ton of bricks.

He lies in a daze amidst the ruins for some unmarked period of time. He's drifting, free associating and nagged by barbs, pulled astray. Thirty or so walkers mowed into their sleeping place for the night, and he can still recall scrabbling up the nearest building they saw, Michonne pulling him up onto the roof, huge pieces of the world giving out beneath them.

And then Daryl realizes Michonne is on the ground a few feet in front of him, not moving one bit.

He gets his legs under him and gasps at the shockwaves of pain from his hand up his arm, more than the assorted aches he can feel everywhere combined. "Fuckin _fuck_ it," he wheezes, skidding to his knees beside Michonne's body. His good hand is covered in wires of blood from indeterminable rips in his bicep, and it smears on Michonne's shoulder when he shakes it. "C'mon, wake up."

Michonne does just that, thank god, and her face twists as Daryl ducks under her arm, leveraging them both up to stagger away from the groaning remains of what used to be the Dahlonega's entrance.

"Never wanted t'ride that stupid mine train anyways," he quips, grinning manically when Michonne tells him to quit it.

They stagger towards the fence, dust exploding after their every step, and it's agony for Daryl to park Michonne and her sword, his crossbow, in the backseat of their car. He starts it up, bathing the road before them in sprawling yellow light to lead them back.

"Your ribs hurt bad?" he asks Michonne in the rearview mirror, and she grits her teeth.

"Probably broken. I'd patch them up if I just knew how."

Daryl moans as he accidentally uses his left hand to grip the steering wheel, one of the more painful things that has ever happened to him, but he gets a second wind and guns the engine.

The car tears through the land, field and forest blurring together until they hit Williamson, and Michonne forces him out of the driver's seat. "We're not far off," she tells him in between harsh drags of her breath, standing under a dawn sky as pink as the inside of a conch. "And you've been driving all night."

True enough. There are stingers and pins in Daryl's eyes; he can already imagine veins bursting in them to flood the white. He manages to get Michonne behind the wheel and plummets into shotgun, watches the windows fog up where his head's slumped against the car door.

He doesn't expect her to start laughing as they pull off the shoulder back onto the road. It's more a kind of chuckle, really, a huffing sort of sound. Yet it pulls her mouth into a genuine smile, crinkles the corners of her eyes, and Daryl's too surprised to do anything but ask what's so funny.

Michonne shakes her head. "We could've stopped at any pharmacy along the way, but instead we just barreled on. Guess that's what having an amusement park fall on you does to your rationale."

It speaks to Daryl's disconnected frame of mind that he finds that funny too, muffling his amusement on the cold surface against his cheek. He's never had this kind of ease with other people since Jess, his own father's jests always cutting too close. It's been a slow going to get here, the alliance sullen on both his side and hers at first, especially after Andrea, after Merle. But they're a team now. He's grateful for the warmth they're able to still radiate, despite their rancorous ventures against the Governor.

That need has been growing less and less, however. He feels better coming back to the prison than he does going out there, something he never predicted. And when their gates creak open to them, he can picture out the crayola color of Rick's eyes already, and that means _home_ more than any one person ought to have the right to be.

Daryl wonders if that should worry him, but then his fingers scream bloody murder at him, somehow in worse condition than they were seven hours ago, and he's thinking of nothing at all.

* * *

For the first week Daryl is stuck on a diet of painkillers and congealed Oreos mutated-mushed together in their packets, he has trouble sleeping.

He and Michonne are stuck on the same boat, circadian rhythms all fucked up after going so long catching just four or five hours between trips. Cabin fever comes on quicker that way, and the bare skeletons of leaves are crunched underfoot when Daryl wanders outside. It's getting chilly enough that he has to don his poncho though it's already light out. Summer came and went too fast for anyone to really notice.

"Hey, blondie," David calls out from under the dining pavilion, whetting his skinning knife. He's several days unshaven and looks appealing in that tough way, wrecked brown curls sticking up on his head. Daryl shows his best sharklike grin, pronounces the guy's name as _dey-vuhd_ instead of _dah-veed_, number one pet peeve. True enough, David cusses at him in Portuguese, flailing his arm wielding the knife, T-shirt sleeves rolled up to his shoulders.

Daryl gives him a hearty middle finger salute, and keeps going. It's scary how perfect the day is, the sky as blue as paint, few tufts of clouds to break it up. Glenn and Maggie walk by, the latter scolding for being out of bed, but Daryl swats them off. "Hope you ain't planning on taking on geeks already," Tyreese chuckles when they pass each other by the inner gate. Beside him, Carol just rolls her eyes. She and Carl know Daryl well enough to not even bother talking him out of whatever idea gets stuck in his head. He's grateful for that.

Along the outer fence line, Rick is braining walkers with what used to be some old-person cane, shirt covered in tacky blood. His eyes crash into Daryl behind him in the field, skip-stutter, his face falling, and then shoot away. "You been avoidin me," Daryl pronounces. He doesn't have the energy to be pissed, just. Hurt, like his lungs have collapsed where he stands.

Rick grimaces, his shoulders pulling up. "I haven't. I was—I've been trying to find a way to apologize to you."

Now Daryl's baffled. "For what?"

"For taking advantage of you while you were," Rick turns to face him, and so Daryl clearly sees his free hand wave at his general direction, unnerved and jumpy as a fly, "under the influence."

Daryl has to take a breath, and almost curls his left hand into a fist before he remembers his broken bones. "I was higher'n a fuckin satellite but that didn't mean I wanted you ta stop. Shit."

"It's not just the fact that you were high, Daryl." Rick meets his gaze, wearing a strange wounded look. "It's the fact that you're seventeen, and I'm nearly twice your age, among many other things."

_them's the breaks_, Daryl agrees inside his head. "You lookin for a way out?" he asks, heart leaping to his throat even before the words leave his mouth.

"No, that's not—" Rick cuts himself off with an agitated sound. "We're doing this way too fast."

Daryl scowls, twists his unbroken fingers in the hem of his poncho. "Like a five-date rule or some bull like that?"

Rick breathes out a laugh. "More like I wanna do this right. Do right by you." His tone is anything but patronizing, instead borne out of genuine warmth that Daryl, fucking sap that he's become, has missed. Rick advances closer enough to be proprietary, yet still far apart from Daryl for things to seem chaste to anyone who could witness this.

There's more silver-gray in Rick's stubble than there used to be just days ago, more lines gentling his mouth. Christ, they've been away from each other for far too long. "Hey, if somethin ain't right, I'll tell you," Daryl says to the dusty ground. "Y'know I always gotta have a word in when there's shit not fine with me."

"Yeah, I _do_ know you," Rick asserts, "and I know for a fact that you only mouth off for appearances. When you're really hurt, or tired, or scared, you don't say a word."

That gives Daryl pause, because there it is again, the twist in his stomach, the flush of non-medication-induced happiness. Because everything gets too strange and too hot sometimes, and in moments of weakness he cowers in the face of his wants, wishes he had never fucked everything up with that first kiss. But it seems like neither of them seem to know what they're doing, and at least they've got each other's backs every step of the road ahead.

"Then you know either way," Daryl says, not minding that his voice grows gentle this time. It's worth it to see Rick smile, as astonishingly endeared as Daryl feels.

"I guess I do," Rick says, and his white-knuckle grip on the cane he's holding relaxes inch by inch.

* * *

Judith is reaching for Daryl's fingers again, fascinated by the alien texture of his splinters. He yanks them away and tries to bite at her fingers instead, grinning hard when she smiles, the bright fullness of a beautiful day rising. She's sitting up all by herself now, still sequestered on people's laps, but it's a feat nonetheless.

At the entrance to the cell block, Zach from the Decatur group is bending down to kiss Beth on the cheek. Daryl watches Beth's eyes scrunch shut and her mouth open on a laugh, looking like a little girl, thrilled with the sweet gesture. He'd been wary of the guy at first, almost as worse as Maggie and Hershel were, but Zach doesn't seem too bad.

If Daryl's being honest, it's out of guilt rather than anything else that he's glad Beth has a boy fawning over her. He can still remember the mortification he felt when, in the dead of winter, Beth had grabbed his hand and tried to lay one on him when everyone else had gone to sleep.

He'd stammered out that he only saw her as a sister, attempted to comfort her when she nearly cried of embarrassment. It's a wonder that they'd managed to establish anything resembling friendship at all. But Beth nudges his knee with hers as she sits next to him on the floor and takes Judith, nothing but ease and familiarity between them, so here they are.

"How much longer until that comes off again?" she asks, motioning to his cast with Judith's arm.

Shrugging, Daryl picks at the edges of the bandages. At this point they've become part of his hand; he can barely remember what life was like without it. A lot easier, he supposes. "Two weeks, I think," he says aloud. "But goddamn, it's been a month of this bullshit. This thing itches worse'n Satan's fire ants."

Beth hums, more thoughtful than amused. "We need some kind of calendar. All we have for the time is Glenn's watch and that's no good for passing days."

Daryl sniggers. "Wanna mark down your monthsary with your boyfriend?" He drags the last word out until it's at least six syllables, and Beth promptly stomps on his foot, not that she succeeds at it.

"It ain't just that. I'd like to keep track of how time passes. It'll help gauge how much has changed. How much _we_'ve changed."

They've changed, alright. Beth still sings, but there's a cynicism to the lyrics now, her tone sharper. Carl is solemn and clear-eyed, aged beyond his years. Carol no longer curls in on herself like she's trying to evaporate, but looks every new dawn straight in the eye. Michonne's nightmares have always been bad, and Daryl's always woken her up from them, whether they were on the road or here at home. But just last night she allowed him to stay and see its aftermath. He sat beside her without either of them saying a word, the two of them staying together until gold-soft morning crept onto the stairs they were waiting on.

They're stronger, and they're family, though Rick has always been more than family to Daryl.

It occurs to Daryl then, a thought that's been about two years overdue and maybe completely obvious. He's not just completely lost to Rick and ruined for girls forever; he's pretty much just gay.

The realization feels way more anticlimactic than he thought it would be. For years Merle had schooled him into the "real men piss on faggots and girlies" philosophy, though it never sat well with him. Bizarrely enough, he's almost disappointed by this revelation. His situation with Rick had been so complex and borderline epic before, so much more interesting. This, everyone goes through this kind of thing, it's nothing to brag about.

But Daryl can see how it makes sense. None of the girls he'd ever thought about had the effect that Martinez or David or the other guys around the prison have on him. They might have hands like Rick's or pale blue eyes or heavyset shoulders, each a really good excuse on his own but they've all got a dick in common, and maybe Daryl's actually just really, really dumb.

"Hey." Beth nudges him with her knee again. "Where'd you disappear to?"

Daryl looks back to his side and sees Judith leaning over to him, grabbing at his arms, little face scrunched up in discontent. Beth is smiling at him, still waiting for an answer, so he tells the truth: "Just thinkin that you're right. 'Bout things and change."

Satisfied with his reply, Beth helps Daryl plunk Judith on his knee again. Their Lil Asskicker beams and starts playing with the top buttons of his vest, drinking in the world with her daddy's eyes.

* * *

The first thing Daryl does after Hershel takes his splinters off is try and restring his crossbow.

"Aren't you supposed to be taking it easy?" Rick asks when he finds Daryl in his cell, drawing back a string with the tensile weight of a hundred and fifty pounds. Daryl can't answer right away, brain paralyzed by the irrational fear that his fingers could snap like twigs again, but he gets to load the bolt just fine, and he stands up with a relieved grin.

"You shittin me? I've gotten fatter'n than a damn bunny rabbit, stuck in here for near a month with nothin t'do."

Rick utters one of his noiseless laughs. "If you were a plump rabbit we would've eaten you by now. There's no rush." He gestures at Daryl's hand. "Now let me see."

Daryl lets Rick inspect his hand, which is done with far more care than he would have expected. Rick fits his fingers into the dents between Daryl's knuckles, bends the joints open and shut. "Looks like they've healed up nicely," he says, right before pressing his lips to Daryl's fingertips, natural as breathing.

It's times like this that get Daryl thinking about his father, when he wonders with a dense pain in his stomach what kind of hellfire Merle would rain down on them for this. But then he remembers what Michonne said, Michonne who is the last and perhaps only soul to witness what Merle was willing to do for him, and he decides that maybe his father would begrudgingly grant him this, and is comforted once more.

"If you think you can distract me from goin back out there with all this, man, don't even bother," Daryl says, snapping back to the present, hating how his voice breaks when Rick looks up at him.

"That wasn't mean to distract." Rick smiles again, quick pull of light across his face. "Were you distracted?"

Daryl tries to glare, except he can't fool anyone with his skin flaming up as it is. "Shuddup."

Rick shrugs, impish, but then grows serious again. "Michonne's still healing, Daryl, no one can come back you up on—"

"Ain't talkin about findin the Governor," Daryl sighs. "I just need somethin to do, Rick. Anythin, c'mon."

Though Rick's eyebrows pull down at first, he does say, "We plan on checking out a factory the next two towns over, tomorrow. You can be point man."

Daryl begins to say something smart but then Rick ducks close to kiss him. It's a dry peck more than anything, and Daryl knows all this is risky, anyone could've walked in on them at any given point. He still makes an absurdly wide grin, and Rick grins back.

There are other ways to show partiality, and Daryl does it that next evening, when Rick is sitting on the steps to the warden's office, plate of meatloaf tucked on his knees, so troubled it seemed to shine through his skin. "You been real quiet since Hershel pulled you onto the field," Daryl says, and when Rick lets loose a grumbling exhale he knows that's what's been bothering the older man. "What'd he say?"

Rick stays in his fugue for a while longer, then asks, "Do you remember what I told you, about letting Glenn and Hershel take over?"

"You gonna take Carl up on that, then?"

"No." Rick pauses, fork scraping at the edges of his meal, closes his eyes in one benedictine moment. "I don't know."

Daryl shrugs, folds his leg up and sips at his bottled water. "No one'll mind if you stay or go from the big chair. But y'deserve a break from all this shit. Really do." And he means it.

Rick nods, fingers hooked on his jaw, and Daryl wants to chase the skin beneath it with his tongue, wondering if it would taste warmer, or softer.

"Thank you," Rick says, the bleakness gone from his voice, brighter and so much harder to stay away from. His hand comes snaking between their bodies, hidden from the others, and feels around blindly. It alights on Daryl's wrist, Rick tapping out a short rhythm, and Daryl is holding his breath.

* * *

Rick wants this, it's clear enough.

He kisses Daryl goodnight like every night's a first date. He listens to the memories Daryl can bear to recount of his father and his uncle, leached slow and relieving as poison. He has Sasha bring back a notebook and a pencil one time, "because I still remember what you drew on Maggie's cast," and Daryl's throat felt sugar-clogged for the rest of that day, ribs cracking like glass because he couldn't hold his joy in.

Nothing below the belt, and Rick insists that they just keep at making out, kid stuff, a brick wall Daryl keeps running into.

Once, just once, they were pressed together in the tombs, Rick's hand on his face and his tongue in Daryl's mouth, bodies tight together and his knee between Daryl's legs. And before Daryl could crow to himself in elation _finally happening_, Rick hauled himself away, his face a violent red and his eyes trained resolutely on the wall behind Daryl, breathing with deep intent for a couple of minutes before he met Daryl's gaze again.

"I'm sorry, I got carried away," he stammered, and Daryl had to lie through his teeth about being glad they stopped before all but locking himself in the shower hall, a fist around his erection and his mouth full of Rick's name, though he bit it back hard enough to bleed.

It's embarrassing, how he's carrying on, a goddamn bitch in heat. Daryl's half-aroused almost all the time and it doesn't mean anything, he's seventeen. Looking at trees gets him hard. Looking at Rick, the only one who wants to live this out like a 50's movie, gets him desperate.

But christ, he doesn't even mean to do what he does that afternoon.

They're in the office block, and Rick is talking about gathering Glenn, Sasha, Carol, Hershel, and Tyreese together to form a parliamentary governing council of some kind. Daryl is kicking at the stray papers on the floor and coughing at the dust that mushrooms underfoot.

"You want a space for 'em, don't set it up in this petri dish," he sniffles. Rick smiles at him sideways, and Daryl gets distracted by a bead of sweat rolling out of Rick's hair, down the slim path of his temple to catch in his stubble.

"If you're allergic to dust and boring manual labor—"

Daryl cuts Rick off without thinking, leans forward to slant their mouths together, clean push of breath when Rick utters a surprised gasp.

Rick does indulge him a little more this time, hands bracketing Daryl's waist, his teeth on Daryl's lower lip like a warning. The world is frozen around them, no time running by unchecked, they can do anything. Daryl tilts Rick's chin up to bite his throat, suck hard on the jerk of his pulse and Rick groans. Dizzy from the sound, Daryl walks them backwards until they hit one wooden wall, presses his hips down onto Rick's. Rick gasps and his eyes fly wide open. "Wait," he says, edge of panic creeping in.

Daryl can't stop now, it'd kill him. He shakes his head, biting the inside of his cheek. "You ain't touchin me," he says frantically. He finds Rick's hands and pins them by his waist. "I ain't touchin you. Nobody's doin shit."

Daryl wedges his leg between Rick's, relishing the sensation of Rick growing hard against him, the odd scraping noise that occurs in the back of Rick's throat because Rick's not telling him to stop. _Rick's not telling him to stop_.

Going as fast as possible, before either of them can grasp the gravity of what's happening, Daryl grinds down on the firm musclebone of Rick's hip, moans when Rick moves in kind. The usually composed man's eyes have gone terribly dark, and his sinful mouth is only half as crushed red as Daryl wants it to be. They kiss until constellations burst behind Daryl's eyelids, but he doesn't pull away because it's like he can't.

Rick starts to lose his rhythm, body wracked with shudders until it goes tense, a high-pitched sigh ringing from his chest. Daryl pulls his head back enough that Rick's eyelashes flutter against his cheekbone, and it drops like a stone in the well of his mind, Rick just _came_ against him, this is what Rick looks like after he's just come, and Daryl thunks his head onto Rick's shoulder, actually fuzzes out for a second or two from the intensity of his euphoria.

Nothing happens for a while. Daryl's ears buzz. Rick breathes shortly, his chest crushed. Eventually, he slides his hands free of Daryl's grip and Daryl meets his eyes and oh. Oh god no.

Rick's face has collapsed, minutely, like someone suckerpunched him in the stomach while he was trying to remain composed. He's gone bone-pale and his hands have balled into fists. Even before Rick opens his mouth to speak Daryl thinks, Merle's voice given perfect clarity, _you done fucked up, boy_.

* * *

**daryl being besties with michonne, carol, maggie, and beth, in that order, makes my heart go squee. and i finally get to own up to that sexytimes tag, ooh lord. but at this point it's just one step forward, two steps back with these boys, innit?**


	20. down like four flat tires

***sidles up like a drug dealer* y'all want any more of 'em underage shenanigans?**  
**Demeanor wrote the boys' conversation way better than i did, though i did try and pattern it a little after their version of events. ehehe.**

* * *

The winter made Georgia shine, wet and gray. It made the passage of time nearly impossible to take note of; the days blurred together, unremarkable, until they were as listless and decomposing as the walkers they would find stuck under blankets of snow.

Rick remembers taking in a deep breath, standing in a puddle on the tarmac, little icicles snapping into his lungs. Beside him, T-Dog was coughing, shivering in his thin coat. He had given his extra layers to Lori, but neither he nor anyone else would have to suffer for long. Puddles meant thawing, and thawing meant springtime was just around the corner.

Daryl had bent down to scoop up the gelatinous white slush on the roadside, rubbing it between his fingers until it soaked through his gloves, and remarked, offhanded, "Shit, I guess I'm a year older."

At T-Dog's probing, it was revealed that Daryl had been born in early January. And since they could only assume that January had indeed passed, they cobbled together a birthday celebration of sorts for him. Beth sang, Maggie and Glenn gave the half-full bottle of Jack Daniel's that got passed around, and Lori took Daryl's hand and placed it against her stomach so he could feel the baby kick. The look of amazement that crossed his face made him look as young as he really was.

He's making the same expression right now, with his body pressing Rick to a wall, like he can't quite believe his luck, like he can't quite recall ever being this happy.

Rick wants to smile back at him, except all he can feel is the knife twisting in his gut: congratulations, you just fucked around with a seventeen-year-old kid.

Something of his thoughts must be visible enough that Daryl's eyes widen, the line of his jaw going rigid. Rick has to say what needs to be said, so he does, no matter that it tastes of agony and regret embroiled together. "We shouldn't have done that."

For one airless moment, it seems that Daryl will burst into tears. But then his gaze deadens, and he takes a step back enough so he can turn around and run, down the hall and through the office doors, faster than Rick's ever seen him go.

He should chase Daryl down, further explain the situation, not leave him stewing with malformed theories and accusations. But it's as if he's been glued to the spot, made catatonic by the severity of his mistakes.

It's a long time before he's able to move again.

Walking around with a sticky uncomfortable mess in his jeans is nothing compared to the floodwaters of hysteria rising in Rick's mind. Anyone he'll come across will know, they'll see his sins scribbled all over him, scarlet letter patches to single him out.

But by some miracle, nothing of the sort happens. Sasha is the only one who points out that he looks stressed, and Rick tells her that he's anxious to know her decision about forming a council, which is truth enough.

She smiles, tells him, "Ty and me are still thinking about it. Don't worry just yet. But you should go take a nap or something, really."

Rick thanks her and beelines to his cell to get new clothes. Judith is fast asleep in her crib, lying on her side with her fist flattened against her drooling mouth. He touches her leg and says quietly, "Your daddy just screwed up big-time, baby," a hole blown wide in his chest, roughening his voice. "I don't know if I can fix this one."

He stays squatted in the shower halls, scrubbing at his underwear and jeans with half a block of hand soap for a painstakingly long time, thinking about nothing, not one thing. Except once he emerges, Michonne and Carol are talking in hasty, worried tones.

"Daryl's gone," Carol says before Rick can even try to ask what's wrong. "Hopped on his bike with his crossbow and took off without even telling the guys on the gate what for." She bites her lower lip. "Curtis said he looked upset."

Rick has to squeeze his eyes shut and steady himself before speaking to either of his friends. "Let's not do anything rash. Daryl's got a good head on his shoulders, he'll know to come back sooner rather than later, he's got no supplies."

Michonne doesn't nod or react, as if she knows that Rick sounds like he's rationalizing the situation to himself more than to them. "If he's not back by tomorrow morning, I'm going after him myself," she says, never mind that her walk back to her cell is slow and pained, Carol having to assist her steps.

It takes every ounce of Rick's willpower not to grab the most convenient vehicle and drive around hunting Daryl right then and there. Misery and fear render him monosyllabic for the rest of the day, wild blood under his skin, fearful of movement.

He's afraid of both Daryl returning, and of Daryl not returning at all.

* * *

"He's coming back, Dad," Carl pronounces, when he comes up to the guard tower with his sister in tow, so sure of himself, and Daryl. "He'll be okay."

Rick shifts the sniper rifle in his hands, checking the treeline through the scope for the umpteenth time. He doesn't mention to Carl that when Daryl last left their group by himself, he did indeed come back, but with an arrow in his side and a massive concussion that drove him to kiss Rick while Carl was recovering in a room just opposite his.

Rick couldn't explain it, still can't. Daryl is so much smarter than that, and Rick's supposed to know better, though look where they've ended up now.

The sun has just dipped below the horizon when Rick hears the firecracker motor of Daryl's chopper, and he's down the tower to haul open the outer gate, fast as his legs and lungs will allow him.

Daryl doesn't so much as glance at Rick. He's slathered in walker blood, as though after shooting the things he had to hack them to pieces too.

Knowing that there's no other way they'll be able to talk, Rick closes the outer gate but keeps the inner gate shut, so Daryl is held firm by steel wire.

"Open the fuckin gate, Grimes," Daryl actually snarls, bared teeth, narrowed eyes, and it's like a millstone has been dropped on Rick's back from an impossible height.

"Where were you?" he pants. "Why'd you—" leave me alone; the selfish accusation sticks to the roof of Rick's mouth— "You just left without warning."

Daryl raises one shoulder in a shrug, leaving a smear of brownblack on the side of his neck while he does. "Had t' get away."

Rick's throat closes up, helpless against the onslaught of emotion that he's been trying to keep in check as background static all afternoon. "From me?"

"Christ, yeah, from you," Daryl spits. "You straight up told me you didn't want –" The mask slips off his face for a moment, but a moment is all Rick needs to see the dull ache of what they've done. Of what Rick's done. "And it was either punch you in the dick or kill somethin, so there."

What's abysmal is Rick can't even tell if he's lying or not, this time, and he adds hastily, "You never let me finish what I was saying."

"Go on and fuckin get it over with, then," Daryl says to the space over Rick's shoulder.

Rick wets his lips, nervous tic brought back tenfold. "I should've stopped it, Daryl. I should've stopped it from ever happening in the first place, hurting you—"

"And this ain't hurtin me, then?" Daryl cuts through, his voice a hysterical pitch higher. "You treatin me like I'm made of fuckin glass?"

"I'm treating you like you're seventeen, which you are," Rick stresses. His fingers feel bruised up where they've molded themselves to the gate's diamond patterns. "We don't have to rush into anything headfirst, you have nothing to prove to me, you hear?"

Daryl stares at him, indecipherable and shadowed. "You know how fuckin stupid you sound?" The words break up as if they're coming from a distance, but the look on Daryl's face is crystal clear. "You got no problem with me comin out here with no backup, I'm tough shit against walkers. But with somethin that'd make me feel good, somethin I want, then I'm just a kid who can't make his own goddamn decisions."

The abominable double standard is making Rick's head spin. Truth be told, the only reason he's never thought of things that way is he's been clinging to the laws of life before the Turn; he had to keep some sort of moral code if he didn't want his guilt and shame to eat him up completely.

But that's not what matters now. Rick swallows hard, lets his hands fall from the chainlink. "I just don't want you to regret it all and hate me afterwards," he says, his heart worn out, because that's what matters most of all.

Daryl's already shaking his head, forehead creased in frustration. "How will I know if you won't let me?"

Rick doesn't have an answer for that.

Daryl reaches out and slides the gate open himself, sending Rick stumbling back with the abruptness and speed of his departure on the chopper, and Rick watches the taillights recede to pennies then match-heads then gone.

* * *

At dinner, Daryl doesn't show, and Rick doesn't try searching for him. If he doesn't want to be found, Rick should respect that. Except he feels raw, tired, his bones put in backwards. He doesn't know how he can keep this up, keep smiling at his family, acting like he hasn't made a monumental mistake.

But Daryl would know. This Rick realizes with a stunned jolt in his bunk much later that night. Daryl had kept a lid on everything inside him throughout the blazing summer and well into the fall, an unshakeable force that only revealed his fallibilities to Rick while they were stuck together in a car one night. He put Lori and Carl first, put their whole group first, every bit the leader and protector that people claim Rick to be. Daryl probably never would have said a word if Rick hadn't spared him the trouble.

And Daryl's not a kid, certainly not. The width of his shoulders, the newly-minted muscles lining his arm, the slat of his stomach haven't given away his true age to those outside their family circle. Glenn once reported that a young lady in Cell Block D had claimed that Daryl was as gorgeous as a Disney animated hero; Daryl's whole face and neck had stayed pink for hours, it seemed.

Rick can still remember wanting to make that pretty flush turn a worse shade than it already was, maybe through sucking on the triphammer of Daryl's pulse, or licking down the path of his spine. He would have gladly gone to his knees, let Daryl wind his fingers in Rick's hair and press forward until they were both shaking and overused. He'd savor the small wet noises from the back of Daryl's throat, the dilated stare of eyes so blue you'd feel sorry for the sky, the bruises that would be left for days because they'd been too rough with each other.

Rick drops back into himself, gasping. He has one hand shoved down his boxers, a tight grip around his erection which is already damp and quivering and jesus. fucking. christ.

Jacking off is something that hasn't occurred to Rick for a long time. Too long, he thinks, going lightheaded for a minute, biting his tongue and twitching in his hand as he imagines pale skin at the small of Daryl's back, the taper of his hips, all those places untouched by the sun, or by anyone else for that matter. It's an exhilarating, rather selfish thought, that Rick gets to be the first and perhaps only person that ever has that privilege.

And that's petrifying. Worse than a herd of walkers, than the entire weight of the seas resting blackly atop his chest, almost as worse as losing Carl and Judith, or any of his family. But he'll take his chances, and if this ends with Daryl uninhibited and happy, it would be well worth the trouble.

Daryl's bedside manner would be a coin toss between utterly shy and utterly rambunctious, not that Rick would have problems with either one. So long as he can leave beard burn along Daryl's stomach and thighs, suck on Daryl's lips until they're swollen and tender, make his spine arch back when he cries out—

Rick doesn't even realize he's coming until he already is, grunting into the meat of his forearm where he's bitten it by accident from trying to keep the sounds in. Longlong seconds in suspension, riding the sensation all the way down, and it's a while before he can stand up to find a used shirt to clean himself with, legs wobbling.

Judith, mercifully enough, has stayed asleep throughout the whole thing. Shadows from the cell window cross her body like swords, and Rick settles for patting the side of her crib instead of a kiss lest he disturb her. The bite throbs along with his pulse, but it's not the kind that can kill him.

He's scoured his mind for days, weeks, cataloguing his old sins and reliving all his new ones, trying to pin down the moment everyone started thinking of him as a good man, wondering desperately if that holds true even now. "maybe i'm not," Rick sighs aloud as he curls up on his bunk again.

And maybe that's not such a cataclysmic thing.

* * *

"What brought that on?" Hershel asks in the morning, gesturing to Rick's arm with the bowl of oatmeal steaming in his hands.

Rick is still wiping away the sleep crusting at the corners of his eyes, so it takes him a moment to process the question. He glances down to see that the bite mark has gone livid overnight, ripe plum-dark, teeth marks clearly visible. He grimaces and sits at the dining hall bench, accepts the bowl from Hershel in lieu of answering the question. Only when Hershel puts on a glare usually reserved for the most stubborn of patients (Daryl) does Rick try and lie.

"Must've done it in my sleep," he says, and shovels oatmeal into his mouth before Hershel can do any more prying. The older man shakes his head like he would at an obstinate child. "At least wash that," he chastises, and Rick grins, picturing Hershel as a new father trying to tame Maggie and Beth into a bathtub.

"Yessir," he murmurs, and then adds, with only the appropriate amount of concern, "Daryl hasn't shown his face yet?"

"No, and no that I or anyone expect him to. That stunt he pulled yesterday—everyone was worried. Carol did say he's hiding out in the southeast guard tower. She tried to get him to come out, but no such luck."

Rick pushes his half-eaten bowl away, stretches with a low exhale. "I'll talk to him."

It's particularly bright out today, Indian summer dry, wading through light so thick Rick wants to brush it away from his face. He doesn't bother trying to quiet his steps when he climbs up the guard tower, and seconds later Daryl's nailsandchalk groan: "I done told ya I'm fine, Carol, just lemme be."

"It's me," Rick calls out before he can lose his nerve, and the trapdoor above him creaks open with reluctance.

Daryl doesn't help Rick up, too busy sparking a match one-handed, singed dark brown mark on his thumb, the quick smell of sulfur and tiny flickers of orange jumping and dying off the end of his smoke. He's twitchy as a junkie, eyes darting everywhere but at Rick, smelling like a funeral pyre and burning up as bad. He probably got as little sleep as Rick did.

"M'sorry, a'ight?" he blurts, and their eyes meet with a crackle that by all rights should have been audible, sitting here on a cold cement floor. "I made it all about me, what I felt. Didn't try t' step into your shoes and see how freaked you are. I ain't—" Daryl's voice breaks, terrified or miserable and Rick doesn't know which there is more of, which is worse— "I ain't doin that no more."

Even now Daryl keeps sacrificing so much, tearing off his own limbs to support the dead weight of Rick's conscience. Rick can only gape for a moment, not thinking about the ocean floor or walkers or jagged cliffs waiting for him somewhere in the future. That stuff is very far away now, and Rick doesn't feel conflicted anymore.

"And if I don't mind that you do?"

He speaks slow, deliberate, and watches Daryl's stop-your-breath blue eyes widen impossibly, mouth going slack. Rick gives in to an old temptation, steps close to rub at that mouth with his thumb. It's dry, but just as soft as he's always imagined it would be. Daryl's whole form seems to melt into Rick's touch, pressing his face into Rick's hand without even realizing he's doing it. Touch-starved, Rick notes, and the smoldering coal in his belly becomes a roaring furnace. He trails his hand down to cup Daryl's neck, the rabbiting pulse therein, and kisses him.

It's both selfless and selfish, give and take. And clumsy, toothy and imprecise, since Daryl keeps grinning, a wonderful sensation to have when it's against Rick's lips. Then Daryl's hand leaves his cigarette to hold Rick's jaw and they start to get better.

Daryl's other hand trails down Rick's arm, and he frowns when he feels the bite mark. "The hell's this." He tugs the forearm up so he can examine it better, and Rick sucks on the inside of his lip, overheated.

"Had to keep quiet," he confesses, quick and low-pitched, a divulged secret. "Thought about you too much."

The glow in Daryl's eyes expand until he looks deranged, but in a very appealing way, since madness is always meant for two. "Jesus fuck," he manages to say, sounding very much like he's been stabbed. He crowds into Rick's lap, cants forward until Rick's back hits the floor. Always trapped between a rock and a hard place, and Rick can't help chuckling at his ridiculous pun.

"Wanna share what's so funny?" Daryl asks, though a smile is still twitching on his panting mouth too. Rick smiles back, strokes the curve of Daryl's shoulder just because he can.

"I'm just glad you're here," he whispers, and cranes his neck to kiss Daryl again.

It all comes apart at the seams from there. Daryl's squirming against Rick, groaning constantly with his tongue dipping wet and deep and frantic into Rick's mouth. He sits up and grabs Rick's hands to drag them to his belt, and Rick freezes.

"You have to promise to tell me if I should stop, you should always tell me," he rasps, a thick feeling in his throat. i can never live with myself if i hurt you, never ever.

Daryl makes a strange, frustrating new sound, as though he's on the verge of tears. "Fuckin touch me already before I break your face," he says, all breathy and tight. And then, the knockout punch: "Please."

Rick works Daryl's belt open, works into the slit of his boxers and moves, the slide of it easy enough. Daryl's chest jumps as his head tips back, eyes closed mouth open, moaning in the back of his throat.

"I'd—" Rick croaks, mortifying, and he has to try again. "It's okay if you touch me back, Daryl."

Daryl's bee-stung mouth curls up as he looks down on Rick, flicking open the buttons of Rick's shirt and then stroking his hands down Rick's bared torso, fingertips catching over his nipples and ribs and Rick hears himself moan out loud, "You're a goddamn tease."

"Payback for all my sufferin," Daryl quips, though his wicked smile betrays his words. The first cautious slide of his fingers against Rick's cock sends a jarring thunderbolt of pleasure, boxers thin and chafing as Daryl finds his way, the hard pressing tips of his fingers under the head, wide palm grinding softly. It's fumbling, uneven and muted by his shorts because Daryl hasn't even gotten to skin yet, and it doesn't matter at all. It's magnificent.

Rick sits up to set his teeth into the wing of Daryl's clavicle, sucking on the graceful curve of it, and Daryl trembles, emits barely held back whines in the shape of Rick's name until he spills all over Rick's hand. He slants in until his face is pressed against Rick's neck, breath rasping threadbare and hot.

Somehow, watching Daryl is exactly as much as Rick needs. He grabs hold of Daryl's wrist and holds him still, grinding against his hand a few more times, chasing the pleasure up and up and then like jumping out of a plane, Rick comes hard all over them both, white noise and joy.

They stay that way for a while. Daryl is heavy on top of him, warm and smelling like sex and nicotine, his damp blonde hair against Rick's cheek. The wind snakes in through one of the open windows, raising a soft rash of goosebumps on the skin of Daryl's hip, still bare to the air, and Rick folds his hand over it, feeling Daryl smile against his neck.

"Jesus. M' I always gonna be this hungry after we do this shit?"

It surprises a laugh out of Rick, though he does try and glare. "That's because you haven't had breakfast yet, you punk," he scolds.

Daryl rolls his eyes, grinning so wide his face might split. He steals a darting kiss, a drive-by kind of thing that leaves Rick's mouth feeling blistered.

"Next time we do this—" He hesitates, like he's not sure if there's such a thing, but he continues, almost daring Rick, "next time, I'm bringin a mattress up here, and food. We won't ever leave."

Rick doesn't let Daryl wait for an answer. "We'll never be seen again," he sighs, forlorn, and his heart lifts when Daryl laughs too.

As if Rick could ever turn his back on this. Even sunk to the ocean floor wouldn't be gone enough for him this time.


	21. interlude v:burn the ashes so they shine

At some point during the party, Glenn realizes Daryl is flirting with David.

The evening started out regularly enough, a simple get-together to celebrate the birth of Frankie's son. The proud new mother cradles Nori close to her chest, wiping away tears every now and then because Nori's father hadn't lived long enough to make it here to the prison with them. Maggie sits by them both under the gazebo, holding Frankie's hand, smiling down at Nori with a fondness that hits too close to home.

Glenn's not ready to have kids. He's not ready because he can still remember Jane and Emma smothering him to make a "little brother sandwich," his father cooking maeuntang whenever he had a cold, his mother's smile whenever Glenn initiated a conversation in Korean instead of English. He's not ready because Maggie cried into his shoulder after she had to cut Lori open.

For once in his life, Glenn's filled with trepidation about something. If it's as important as a baby, a new family together, that is too monumental to fuck up.

He shakes his head and picks at the label of the beer he's holding, getting glue under his fingernails. He's never had such trepid thoughts while he was drunk before. The apocalypse is such a buzzkill.

There's a scattering of moonlight dousing the open ground, swatches of pale silver side by side with the guttering orange of the bonfire they've made. About ten paces to Glenn's left, Daryl says something and David laughs. They're slouched against the chainlink, same as him, two young hot-blooded males bonding.

Glenn glances at them right as Daryl reaches out, touches David's arm. David tilts his head, and Daryl smirks, too-long hair fanning over his cheek. Glenn turns away, his throat feeling scalded.

_daryl's flirting_, Glenn thinks as he sips the last of his beer. And then, more monumental, _daryl's GAY_, and chokes on air and libation combined, coughing and tearing up and trying not to make a scene.

It's not that he's suspected, before. Daryl turned down Beth, a pretty girl his age, which is strange enough behavior for any teenage guy. But it's one thing to speculate and another to have Daryl, hardass master and Glenn's family, doing an approximation of bedroom eyes in real time.

Rick, at first an inconstant shadow amongst others on the opposite side of the fire, comes over to pound on Glenn's back. "Alright there?" he asks, grinning.

Glenn shoves at him weakly, a stinging metallic feeling in his lungs. "Gimme your beer and I will be," he rasps, and Rick chuckles, offers up his own bottle for Glenn to siphon clean.

"Slow down, you're the only person I know who can turn two drinks into a lost weekend," Rick says mildly, patting Glenn's shoulder. It takes Glenn a minute to find an acrid rejoinder, though when he looks up Rick isn't there anymore, but across the yard, following Daryl up the steps back into their cell block.

Glenn doesn't think about the whole thing again until the next morning, when Maggie's helping him pull on a shirt as he buttons up her pants. They didn't have sex, not really, just woke up together pressed skin to skin, an unhurried kind of intimacy that's almost as good as sex. Just almost, though.

"It seems Rick and Daryl are finally sleeping together, thank god."

And with that, Glenn's out of his depth again. "What? _Rick_ and Daryl? Our Rick?" He strains to understand. "But Daryl was flirting with David last night, not Rick."

Maggie chortles, sits back on their mattress to pull on her boots. "Maybe they like having jealous sex. They disappeared together, y'know. You saw."

"Jeez. Daryl and Rick," Glenn repeats, mind clicking and catching like an engine in the cold. It would explain why the two of them would suddenly decide to leave the party together, though if they're trying to keep this under wraps, that's the very way to _not_ do it.

"It's weird that I figured it out before you, you've been with them longer." Maggie grins, that impish grin that never bodes anything good. "You even kissed Daryl once, y'know."

"_What?_"

Listening to his wife explain how he once drunkenly made out with a close friend is right up there in Glenn's list of bizarre experiences. "Oh jesus. Okay, c'mon, I didn't even." His head feels split open, fused back together with the two halves not fitting right. "I was drunk. And I didn't even know he was jailbait back then!" A thought occurs to him then: "Rick doesn't have that excuse."

Maggie shrugs. "Sixteen's the age of consent. And it doesn't look like Rick's pulling Daryl by the hair and all. The kid's wanted this for a long time. It's not our place to judge."

"But Lori –"

"C'mon. You saw how sour that got, before she—" Maggie falters, and continues bravely, "before the end." Glenn squeezes her hand, and she smiles back, a little more somber, but still just as radiant. "They seem to be making each other damn happy enough. Just like you an' me, sourpuss."

Glenn rolls his eyes, laughing. "I'm not a sourpuss. Nobody says sourpuss anymore, babe." But the sun is soaking them through the guard tower windows, and the idea of darylandrick doesn't bother him as much anymore. They need more of these miracles, of being safe and lucky and well-loved.

* * *

Sasha is a problem solver. When she was seven, she completed a three-by-three jigsaw puzzle of the Taj Mahal after Tyreese had thrown his hands up and surrendered. It only took her an hour and a half, lying on her stomach listening to her mom play cello in the golden morning. Tyreese sulked the whole day, grumbling, "at least you weren't such a pest buzzing in my ear while you were doing it," the sourest grape she and their parents ever did see.

Puzzles turned to riddles turned to people, and it's not that she spies on purpose. She knows the difference well enough: problems can be solved, but people need to solve themselves. All she does is find the facts and put them together.

But this particular problem needs her direct intervention, because Tyreese gazing after Karen like a moon-addled calf is too pathetic to witness for even a second longer.

"Look, she works the fence, clearing up the biter buildup," Sasha says, hurrying her footsteps because her older brother is doing his best to run away from her. It never ceases to amuse her that she's the one who acts four years older when it's really the other way around. And squirmy Ty is the best Ty. "Sometimes she even drives the truck that hauls all those bodies away. Get some alone time."

She grins at him, but he furrows his brows, hand tight on the broom he's been using to clear the library. "Man, you know my track record with the ladies," he says, and yeah, she knows it too well. The few times Tyreese has ever tried to put himself out there always ends the same, Sasha getting him roaring drunk after another catastrophic breakup. She had different reasons for disliking all those girls, but Karen is nice, sensible, and pretty cute, except her teddy bear brother fell for her first.

"Well, I'm sure she's been looking at you too," she tells him, "and I'm not making this up. You know I'm not one for false hope."

That gives Tyreese pause, enough that he stops sweeping and blushes, a little. "Yeah?"

And there's her brother's optimism that could put a lighthouse to shame. "Yeah," Sasha confirms. "But you gotta know, I'm not just doing this out of the goodness of my heart. Your lovesick face is _toxic_. You're worse than Rick is around Daryl."

He huffs, but then catches on. "—wait, what about Rick and Daryl?"

"C'mon, don't tell me you haven't seen it."

Sasha couldn't understand it either, at first. It's something in the eyes, though, the way they look at each other, the way they can isolate themselves in a group of people, just by catching each other's gazes, the way they come to decisions without saying a word. They always seem hyperaware of each other, and it shows the most whenever they're on runs, Daryl shifting unthinkingly to let Rick slip by him, Rick turning unerringly to find Daryl in a corner of the room, like they always know where the other is. And more than that, the way they're casually, comfortably physical with each other, having no problem putting a hand on the other's elbow shoulder chest hip, never jerking away awkward and embarrassed when they pass each other in tight corners.

She was on watch duty some days ago when Daryl emerged from the southeast guard tower, just across from the one she was in. He was followed by Rick, and for a while they did nothing but stand toe to toe, studying each other quietly in the darkness, one of the still singular moments of two souls doing nothing but stare at each other, like there was nothing else they wanted to do.

When they shared a kiss she shouldered her rifle to check through the scope, giving deference to her new family.

Tyreese raises an eyebrow. "Huh. None o' them look the type, is all. And Daryl? Kid looks like he's barely outta diapers."

"That kid can outshoot you any day and – okay, now you're just changing the subject." Sasha levels him with her best shit-eating smile. "You had better talk to her tomorrow or—"

"_Sassafras_," Tyreese whines, and he only ever uses that nickname to spite her out of her wits, but she will not back down. Sasha Williams is a grown-ass woman on a mission.

"—or I'm withholding Starburst privileges," she finishes with a flourish.

He glares, and he actually looks a little scary "Like hell you are."

"Like hell I am," Sasha agrees, because she is the best sister ever, and she always looks out for what's hers, even if it's more tough love than love.

* * *

**ahahaha do you ever just want to blanket sasha in quilts and fill the gaping holes in her heart with candy because that's me 24/7. also i dunno if you guys caught that little aside but watch as i casually make her bisexual you can't stop me**

**this has been more of a filler chapter, sorry, folks. we get back to the boning...er, action in the next one!**


	22. open it up and now the devil can ride

**so sorry this is late, entertaining relatives and writing in airports and bus terminals aren't good for the muses. warnings for acephobia/teenage doucheassery, and a blowjob. hooooooh.**

* * *

The council-to-be had been going around for weeks now, asking the prison's residents if they'd be alright with a select group of people doing the major decision making. Carol gave the news last night at dinner: she, Glenn, Sasha, Tyreese, and Hershel would use the library as their meeting space, and people could approach them and suggest ideas to better their defenses. Everyone's more than alright with it, and Rick can concentrate on being Farmer John.

Daryl's helping with that right now, shoveling the soil, making it loose enough for seeds to burrow through. It's a relief to be digging something that's not a grave, a reminder that they're here for the long haul, for as long as they're given.

The roamers are scattered against the fencing, their gurgling ignorable, and the boiled hue of the sky promises a good day. A few feet away Rick is on his knees, busy yanking grass loose and piling it up for kindling. Daryl watches the play of Rick's muscles in his back, T-shirt pulled tight over his skin.

Rick glances over his shoulder and Daryl's not quick enough to turn away, heat snapping into his face startlingly fast. He casts his head down, bemused that he can escape Rick's gaze but not his laugh.

"Don't tell me you're still embarrassed, Daryl."

Rick's filled in the blanks of how he had to drag Daryl away because he'd flirted with David while drunk out of his wits, and in front of everybody. It's been days since that's happened, yet until now Daryl's been avoiding David, been trying to work out how Rick feels.

"If you're pissed about what I did, what I started, just." He buries his shovel into the ground again, solid jarring sensation up his arms and through his core. "Come out an' say it. It's okay if you are." He's glad his words are calm and reasonable, the complete opposite of the mania he's carried around all this time.

Except Rick pushes that doubt clean out of sight with a shrug, and, "Well, I'm not. Besides, you may have started it but I ended it."

Daryl flushes, recalling the night in snippets: being pulled into a dark corner, his fingers sucked into Rick's mouth, Rick's fingernails leaving crescent-moon indents at the top of his thigh. Rick is grinning up at him like he knows exactly what Daryl's thinking, that joyful grin Daryl will never tire of tracking down.

Carl's presence delivers a rude awakening, ambling down the hill with a shovel of his own, carried on his shoulder like a rifle. He's oddly quiet when he works beside them, and then Daryl notices that dirt is being shoveled onto his boots with clear intent. He glares at Carl, and all the little shit does is smirk outright.

Daryl's patient enough that he waits until Carl's asking his dad about finding comic books, then grabs a clumpful of loose earth and shoves it down the back of Carl's shirt, guffawing at his outraged holler. It doesn't help that Rick's chortling too, and Carl punishes him by catapulting soil at his chest.

They get sidetracked by dirt fighting and barely get any work done, though they can blame it on the sudden downpour that has them racing for the safety of their cell block, tracking mud and laughter. Daryl shivers from something other than the rain's chill because Rick's eyes have skinned down, become slitted and dark as Daryl peels off his vest, tugs at his undershirt.

Maggie's wolf-whistle snaps the moment in two, and Daryl doesn't know if he should be grateful or frustrated or an amalgamation of both.

* * *

Michonne takes the battered sedan on her first venture out alone, and Daryl stands awkwardly beside it on the open lot. He had stayed with her to watch the weather clear up, bright patches in the heavens opening like lit windows in a condemned building. "Looks like I'm good to go," she says, cracking a small smile.

Daryl nods, and his worry is alleviated, a little, by how Michonne steers the car at the same pace he's walking, slowing her departure. When he slides open the inner gate, he reached through her rolled-down window, squeezes her shoulder. "Be safe and kill that sumbitch, yeah?"

"You got it," she chuckles, but her eyes show that she's taking this sober promise to heart. Daryl stands by the gate until she's driven past the guard towers and disappeared down the curve of the dirt road. He knows he won't be fully alright until she comes right back through those gates again, same thing he always feels whenever Glenn or any of their people wander out there without him by their side. He doesn't care about finding the Governor, and this is the first time he can tell himself this and not be lying to himself. He doesn't need that anymore.

Antsy as hell now, and Daryl tries to light a cigarette though the brittle breeze is swatting him, protecting the whickering flame of the lighter he's gained. Some paces away under the dining pavilion, Patrick and Zach are talking, animated ups and downs of tone. Daryl doesn't mean to eavesdrop, except he hears Beth's name come up, so he leans against the gate, pretends to be occupied.

"What do you guys do anyway?" Patrick asks, and the grin in Zach's voice is audible when he replies, "Well, we talk, hold hands, kissing. Pretty great stuff."

Patrick coughs, then stutters out, "You don't, uh. Y'know, _do_ it?"

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what Patrick's asking after. Daryl braces for Zach to brag and proclaim Beth his conquest, the hand free of his smoke tightening up at his side. To his pleasant surprise, the guy just snorts, "Nah. Never have."

"But you want to, right?" Patrick says, incredulous, like he can't imagine a boy seeking something other than sex from a girl, fucking typical.

"Oh, he wants to," someone else scoffs, and Daryl glances behind him for just a second to see David's jeering smirk as he joins the boys at their table. "But that girl was probably in, like, eighth grade when Zacky got his first blowjob. He's just doesn't want old Hershel's wrath on him."

There's a lot to think about there. Primarily, how does David know when Zach got his first blowjob, or not really, because they came out of Decatur together, they must know more than they'd want to about each other by now. More to the point, the fact that Daryl didn't even exist yet when Rick got his first blowjob.

Zach groans, all the way annoyed now. "Seriously, I don't want to. And we definitely don't need to anyways. We talked about it. Her sister says it's called being asexual, which makes sense to me."

David barks out a mean laugh. "Kid just doesn't wanna share. Come on, not even one little dirty story?"

Daryl figures that if he can not like girls, it's not too far out to imagine Zach not liking sex, so he chooses that moment to saunter up to their table, grabs a cup of water from the gallon beside them. "David's just jealous he don't got his own girlyfriend," he drawls, loud enough that Ryan frowns at them from where he's preparing lunch. "Frustration's makin 'im stir crazy."

Instead of reacting with an elbow to the ribs or a crass insult as expected, David sprawls back in his chair, regards Daryl with a tilt of his head. "Then maybe you can help with that," he murmurs, and his tone is jesting but his eyes are dead serious.

Patrick squeaks, so horrified he's about to piss himself. Daryl tries to take a breath and find that he can't. He's three seconds away from dislocating the guy's jaw when Zach titters nervously. "Shit, dude, did you just proposition Daryl? He's not gay. Or, er." He grins, too much teeth, his eyes too wide. "I just assume you're not. But it's not safe to assume but anyway – you're not, right?"

Daryl can't trust himself to speak, so he stares daggers at both Zach and Patrick in turns, and they take it as their cue to gather their dirty plates and spoons, head for the safety of the dishwashers.

"What you said at the party says otherwise, _amado_," David tells Daryl, and the anger coalesces into nauseating panic. "I can still remember you sizing me up like you'd swallow me whole, then Rick stealing you off." A slow, calculated smile passes over his face like a cloud. "Is it him who fucks you? Is that why you've been staying away?"

Daryl's not going to stand here and listen to this, his blood hot and riled. "You and me, we got some very different versions of events, but I'm trustin mine," he snaps, sounding confident enough that he almost believes himself. "Rick just stopped me from doin somethin stupid. Which is more than I can say for you, you keep talkin to me like that."

"Textbook internalized homophobia," David sighs, almost sad, with an infuriating condescension to it, like he thinks Daryl won't understand these fancy words being aimed at him with a sniper's precision. "I had hoped you would be better than that." He reaches out and strokes two fingers down Daryl's breastbone, a final taunt.

Because he can't do anything else, Daryl smacks the asshole's hand away and stalks off, the thudding in his ears engulfing his deeply rattled thoughts.

* * *

It's quiet out tonight, nothing to watch except the trees moving in the wind, a few stray walkers idling in front of Daryl. He sets down his Mossberg and feels for a cigarette in his pocket only to find that his carton's empty. "Fuckin shit," he grunts, flopping back on the single mattress he's wrestled up here. It's sagging in the middle, though he's too keyed up to care, an electric wire with the casing stripped off. He settles for wiping down his crossbow, even if he can't spot a crust of grime, and he's done this twice already.

Rick climbs through the hatch after what seems like an age. "Hey," he greets Daryl, kneeling at the edge of the mattress while shedding his jacket. His eyes glitter in the shadows like quartz on the sea floor, the column of his throat ready for bruising, but Daryl can't bring himself to touch Rick.

"All good?" he asks instead, going back to oiling the string of his bow.

"Yeah. Everybody's gone to bed." Rick sits beside Daryl, presses their mouths together, though he pulls away when Daryl doesn't kiss back. "Are you okay? Something's been bothering you, these past few days. Is it Michonne?"

He's so concerned, and Daryl's too sick to his stomach to lie. "Not just that. David's prolly guessed. About us." He swallows and sets the crossbow somewhere behind him, slings his arms around his shins pulled up against his chest, squeezing hard.

Rick nods, close enough that his hair rustles against Daryl's. "And you don't want him to tell?"

"You want Carl, and Hershel and Carol and everyone t' hear it from that douchebag?" Daryl bites out, and tucks his face against his knees, tasting denim and dirt, utter agitation. "Fuck."

Rick shifts, the presence of his hip against Daryl's faint yet there. "Well, I talked with him earlier. He agreed that it wasn't his place to tell."

Daryl bristles, having only locked in on the words _i talked with him_, and Rick extends an arm, wraps it around Daryl's waist. "Hey, I didn't give full disclosure. Just made him step away from our business. And you."

That gets Daryl to huff a laugh and raise his head. "That musta been a fun talk."

Rick hums, lets Daryl tilt into him and stretch his legs out so that it lies along Rick's from the thigh down. They sit like that in easy silence, until Rick starts the conversation again with, "So you don't want people to know?"

"No," Daryl says immediately, then grimaces at how it sounds. "I dunno."

Maggie knows of Daryl's feelings for a man more than twenty years his senior, but she might react in a very different way once she knows he's sleeping with the man in question. Carol would scold him and say he's being rash, not thinking straight (there's a pun there that Daryl's too queasy to appreciate). And Carl and Michonne—he can't even begin to think about it, not yet.

Thankfully, Rick's of the same mind. "We'll have to tell people ourselves, but not right now," he decides. He starts to stroke the tender skin of Daryl's side, muted by layers of clothing yet Daryl's eyes slide closed anyway. "We're still figuring things out, aren't we?"

"Yeah," Daryl mumbles, because sometimes he puts his hands on Rick to be sure of his place in the world, Rick a keystone to the unanchored drift of the past year, of his whole life since his mother went up in smoke. It's a fairly large burden, but they even each other out, weights and counterweights to this strange, stunning thing that can't hold a candle to the momentariness of David or Martinez or anyone. "Thank you."

And because he can't say it enough, Daryl says it again by skating his lips over Rick's throat, his fingers wandering to fit Rick's thigh, tense then lax then tense again. Rick finds his shoulders and kisses him, leans him back on the mattress with his arms pillowing Daryl's head. It's not lost on Daryl, the size and weight and heat of Rick, the bizarre creeping thrill of having him between Daryl's legs like this.

"Hey," Rick murmurs after a while, and Daryl's too punch-drunk gone to understand for a second or two that Rick's trying to edge off his vest. "Take this off?"

In a rare fit of confidence, Daryl sits back up to do as asked, and starts unbuttoning his inner shirt too. Rick drinks it in with more solemnity than expected. "You have no idea how glad I am I can't see your bones anymore," he confesses, palms skating up Daryl's arms.

Daryl doesn't know how to reply. Winter was hard on everyone, Beth's and Carl's cheeks sheared of baby fat, Rick reduced to whipcord muscle. There's nothing special about this.

Rick seems to think otherwise. He yanks his shirt off his head and crowds forward, his hands on Daryl's waist to get him lying back down. They kiss until Daryl's mind blurs, rasp of the hair on Rick's chest and their hips locking together for many glorious moments. And then Rick asks, "Turn over for me?"

Daryl forces himself not to flinch, because what's Rick gonna do, what does he want. He squeezes his eyes shut as he rolls over, arms gone iron-stiff. Though he may be pretty much a virgin, he knows how these things go, Merle showing off the notches on his bedpost at every given opportunity. He wants to give Rick everything, except he's not sure how to.

However, Rick's touches just meander, tracing his skin in repetitive patterns, and Daryl realizes Rick is following the lines of his tattoos.

"You never told me how you got these," Rick says, his lips landing on the top of Daryl's shoulder blade, then the bottom of it, a kiss for each demon, making Daryl's chest hurt in the best way. He pushes up so he can get on his back again because he needs to see Rick's face, for as long as he can get away with.

"Jess did 'em for me. Merle wanted me in some bareknuckle fights and bet against the pricks who'd shortchange me, but nobody believed I'd survive a second in the ring. The ink made me look tough enough, I guess. I was a fourteen year old facin all these high school dropout kids, it was cool playin underdog."

Jess and his artistic streak he must've passed down to Daryl, manifesting the dark parts of him first on paper, then on his literal, as well as proverbial, shoulder. It's one of the few fond memories Daryl has of his uncle and his father together, Merle in a sober yet remarkably cheery mood, taking Sharpie and drawing a garish naked lady on Jess' arm while he worked, Jess laughing and critiquing the caricature-ness of it. It was a good day.

But Rick's mouth has thinned, and he's rubbing Daryl's knuckles like he's imagining blood and bruises on them. "You froze up for a second back there," he says, pained. "I'm sorry. You know I won't ever make you do anything you don't want me to, right?"

Daryl grins and kisses Rick's chin, savoring the stubbly scratch on his lips, reassuring him, "I know. But y' can ask nicely, though."

The change in Rick's eyes is more than visible, a gleeful sort of darkness creeping in. "There _is_ something I want you to let me do now." Fear and ungodly desire crowd in Daryl's throat, and he loses his breath when Rick whispers, thick and warm into his ear, "Would you mind if I put my mouth on you?"

Daryl stares, can't believe Rick really just said that, that one of his most beloved fantasies is about to come true. He forms an unintelligible growling sound, then a choked "definitely not."

"Good." And that's just unfair, how the force of Rick's sweetly-pitched voice mirrors that of a barrage of asteroids. He licks along the trench of Daryl's clavicle, sucks at his nipple and though he's not that sensitive there, Daryl seizes up with a groan. Rick busies himself with Daryl's belt, fingers worming in between leather and skin.

In the time it takes Rick to shove off Daryl's jeans and boxers, Daryl's wondering if Rick is going to want the same from him. He wonders if he'll be able to. But he shouldn't worry about just that yet. He lifts a shaking hand, touches his fingertips to Rick's temple.

Rick's face colors abruptly, and he shows a nervous grin. "I'll have to warn you that I haven't done this before," he says, right before ducking his head and taking Daryl into his mouth with a small happy sigh.

Daryl cries out, much too loud, and he has to muffle the embarrassing sounds he utters, nearly tearing through the heel of his hand. He's more than willing to be Rick's training ground, letting him find a rhythm for the squeeze of his hand, the roll of his head, making Daryl's body somehow tighten and melt all at once.

Rick pulls off sometime after, wicked twist of tongue and his hand working slick and tight, keeping Daryl right there. His eyes are overbright, pupils spiraling. "Doing okay?" he asks, and Daryl can only tug on his curls as a rebuke for asking stupid questions. His lungs close up when Rick moans from the action, grinding into the mattress like he can't help it, a most interesting turn of events. Daryl tugs harder and Rick has to rip open his own fly for some kind of relief.

"Someday," he pants, "we're going somewhere secure enough that we can take all the time we want."

Daryl would agree with enthusiasm except Rick's mouth finds Daryl's cock again, and he keeps sinking down, and down, until his nose is flush to Daryl's stomach and Daryl is surrounded in impossibly tight wet heat and that's all for him, that's all.

Rick sprawls by his side with a hand down his boxers and a low whimper building in his chest. Daryl chases after the strange white taste of himself on Rick's tongue, cards his fingers through Rick's hair until Rick's back curves as he comes, moaning through gritted teeth.

They're pressed close together, heartbeats running fast and high as a bird's. Daryl rests his forearm across his eyes and smiles up at the moon thousands of miles away, knowing that Rick is smiling at it too.

* * *

"I've been seeing signs for a place called Terminus. They keep popping up along the tracks of the old railroad."

Michonne's sitting on the steps leading to their cell block, a jacket on and one leg up, knee folded like a jackknife, her hands around her ankle and her fingers woven together. Daryl's beside her, rolling a bottle of water in his hands, wishing she'd swing the katana off her back as a sign she'll stay longer.

"Y'think maybe he's found himself a new camp?" he asks instead, humoring her.

Michonne shakes her head, staring sightlessly at the browned leaves caught under the windshield wipers of her sedan, evidence of autumn. "It's pretty far off from Woodbury. I doubt he'd torch the place and turn right around to where he came." She shrugs, adds, "At least, that's what my gut's telling me."

Daryl frowns up at the waning sun hooked on a cloudless sky. "What else's it tellin you?"

"What do you mean?" Michonne turns to face him, curious. There's no undercurrent of exhaustion, no strain like Daryl was hoping to find. She looks just the same.

But Daryl still needs to risk a stab at a complicated subject by telling her, "Mine's tellin me the trail's gone cold. For a while now."

Jaw clenched, Michonne doesn't say anything for a while. "I can't stop," she whispers just when Daryl's given up on hope for an answer, stilted and an indeterminate shade of emotion.

"Yeah, you can," Daryl says, hating how futile his reassurances are, how they'll do nothing to take the war out of this woman, shield the unarmored parts of her.

"I can't." The break in Michonne's voice is a terrible thing. "I've already lost too much to him. To _this_."

She gestures to their field of graves, to the walkers surrounding their fences, to the world. Daryl nods, and asks, a dull ache radiating from his ribcage, "Andrea?"

Michonne's hand wanders up to rest at her necklace, rubbing the pendant between her fingertips like rosary beads. She says the next words slowly, flayed from her bones, "And my son."

Daryl's stunned at first, the idea of Michonne as a bereft _mother_, but then he remembers the way she flinches whenever Nori or Judith cries, the hankered carry to her shoulders when Carl came running up to greet her this morning. Her hand on Daryl's shoulder, sometimes, as though she's seeing someone else when she looks at him. But it's him she sees now, as she makes her voice leathery-tough when she says, "Don't ask me to talk about it. And don't ask me to stop."

"Okay," Daryl replies, easily enough, and the smile he shows her is brittle but sincere. "But I'll always be here. For whatever y' need."

Michonne can only nod, so sad it seems to shine through her skin. Then it suddenly breaks with a faint smile of her own. "It's quiet without you out there."

And that's the moment when Daryl knows that once he and Rick are ready to tell people about this, Michonne won't bat an eyelash, will accept him wholeheartedly. Because, like the people they've brought out of the cold, they're strays who have adopted each other, and he's part of what brings her home.


	23. like clouds without rain

Rick's life funnels down. There's gardening in the morning, keeping watch in the afternoon, and then there's having dinner with Judith in his lap and Carl beside him, more his age again now that he's lost the hat and the haunted gleam to his eye. And Daryl, always Daryl, watching them while candle-lit because they're conserving power, and it hurts Rick's throat to look at him for too long.

They end up in the generator room, four in the morning and the both of them the only ones awake, dawn fighting its way past the trees outside. Daryl wanted to try his hand at cocksucking, and this is the best way Rick can ease him into it, on his knees with his lips skidding on Daryl's finely-haired belly, Daryl cursing and clutching at the nape of Rick's neck.

And then it's Daryl's turn, staring up Rick's body as he reminds the older man, "Say if I'm doin anythin wrong," mere seconds before licking up the length of Rick's cock and then sucking in the head, sinking down slow and devastating, his gaze boring into Rick with his eyebrows angled up: _is this okay, am i doing okay?_

Rick's having trouble just remaining upright, is the problem; he can't exactly give pointers when Daryl is tracing his tongue on the underside of his dick. Daryl's mouth scorching and wet, thumbs digging into Rick's hipbones, and with each second that passes Rick knows for a fact that he is getting away with something tremendous. He can't watch it happen, moans Daryl's name up at the ceiling instead, feeling the vibration of his answering groan around his cock. He has to grip Daryl's shoulders, take in huge ragged sheaves of air and focus on not losing it right there.

Daryl goes too far and chokes, has to withdraw coughing and glowing with mortification. "Sorry," he rasps, rubbing at the hinge of his jaw, and Rick can't help but smile. His mouth aches the same way too.

"Don't be," he soothes Daryl, touching the younger man's swollen lips in astonishment. "Take it easy, you don't have to do this right now."

A ridiculously intent expression of desire springs on Daryl's boyish face, his eyes turned solid black. "I'll still need the practice," he says, smug little punk, and plunges right back in, nails scratching angry welts in the swell of Rick's ass. It flashes through Rick like hard liquor, what Daryl could do to him if his control honed in (or gave out) just a little bit more, marking him up enough that he'll feel it for days.

He only barely gathers the sense to push Daryl back and take himself in hand, coming in three neat strokes. Daryl gets back on his feet to help Rick stay standing, tucking Rick back into his pants in a somehow more intimate gesture than what they've just done. Daryl licks at Rick's hand in what might have been meant as a coquettish taunt, but then grimaces. "Still tastes fuckin weird," he complains, and Rick has to laugh and kiss him, dip his tongue into Daryl's mouth though it's dirty, so filthy.

It still isn't quite clear to Rick what he's doing. Around his children, and all their family, it doesn't seem possible that he's also the guy who Daryl's started blowing on a regular basis. These two things can't coexist in the same man, and Rick feels like a serial killer or something, maintaining a stark double life where all his wickedness comes out at night.

This can't be possible because surely someone would have called them out by now. They aren't exactly being subtle, though they are getting better at sneaking around.

"Glenn looks at me funny sometimes," Daryl says one day, when he's wiping down his chopper, and an irrational fear rises to Rick's throat, sharp as bile, that he only barely strangles back. He's leaning against the trunk of one of the cars they store in the sunstroked open lot, where no one can hear them, and if Daryl feels safe enough to talk about this here, Rick should too.

"Funny how?" he manages to say, pretending to be more occupied with sketching out plans for a horse paddock. Michonne had spotted some gone wild, roaming near the ruins of Woodbury, and Rick tries to focus on Judith's reaction to seeing one of the animals up close for the first time, anything but possible encroaching disaster.

Daryl huffs, and wipes the grease off his fingers with the red rag he's never lost. "Like, shit. I dunno. When we're on runs together or talkin, s' just. Weird." He pulls a face that's more conflicted than angry, and Rick's about to assume the worst when Daryl tacks on a surprising, hurried, "Maybe it's 'cause we kissed, once."

"You. You did?"

It's obvious from Daryl's shrug that he doesn't want to elaborate, but for Rick's benefit he continues anyway. "Was a long time ago, at the CDC, 'member that shit?" And Rick does remember, Daryl awash with alcohol and unprocessed grief; all of them in that same boat, really. Daryl stuffs the rag into his back pocket again, the slash of his eyes through his pale hair narrowed in concentration. "He was five sheets to the wind an' all, but it weren't no big deal. Even told Maggie 'bout it, she laughed it off." He laughs once, too high, off-key. "So yeah, you ain't exactly my first kiss."

Daryl has been holding on to this for a while, turning the story over and over in his mind, finding no angle where Rick can accepts this without a fight. He's expecting one right now, shoulders curled forward, neck bent, worried mouth. He heaves in air and looks frantic for just a half-second, reining himself in blank and cool. Rick can't stand that bloodless look on Daryl's face, he'd prefer psychosis.

"I don't mind that I'm not the first," Rick says, and it's true, "because it doesn't matter. You're not something to be claimed like that, Daryl. Never will be."

Daryl's unmoving for a few more seconds, until he shakes his head sharply, makes a raspy throat-clearing sound. "Awright." He sounds astonished, but soon enough a smile blooms on his face, still mostly nerves, but a smile sure enough. He kicks at Rick's shoe, and Rick grins back so wide it hurts, hooks his ankle around Daryl's in reply. He spills eraser shavings onto his lap for his troubles, not that he minds.

They're two blind guys walking hand-in-hand, and that image won't shake free, jammed in Rick's head like a chorus: him and Daryl in dark glasses with their fingers intertwined, miles of green grass spread out like an ocean around their very small island.

* * *

Rick finds the sign while out on a run for crop fertilizer. It's sitting in a greenhouse where the plants have sagged in their pots and the flower petals powderize between his fingers. On the wall behind the table of this sepia photograph of a display is a 'This Workplace has gone 98 Days without an Accident' placard, white and blue under the dust devil-gray that's accumulated on it. There's a whole other set of numbers resting on the table to complete the count. Rick wonders how long it's been, down to the exact month and day and second, since the dead stopped staying dead, and decides it doesn't matter.

Shanda raises her eyebrows at him when he comes back to their truck to put the sign in the backseat, the numbers peering from his shirt pocket. "Is that supposed to be an inside joke?" she asks, good-natured, pulling her headscarf tighter around her neck when a cold draft hits them, and starts up the engine as soon as Rick has tied their cargo down.

"Something for Beth," he clarifies, and hops back into the shotgun side. Through the windshield, the sky seems very close, blue glass shrinking down on them claustrophobically. Beside him, Shanda smiles, perhaps recalling the times she and Beth would sing together, the Monkees and Fleetwood Mac and other strange choices for a blonde Catholic girl and a Malaysian Muslim woman pushing forty. The two of them got along so well because they both surprised people, in that way and many others.

"She's going to love it," she reassures Rick, and he can trust that judgment.

Shanda's there when he presents the sign to Beth, and grins when the young lady hugs her, then him, in turn. "How'd you know I wanted something like this?" Beth asks, still flushed from delight, shifting on her feet in her cell.

"Daryl told me so," Rick says, and adds, "and Shanda gave it her seal of approval. So it's good."

Beth nods, already sorting the numbers into an ordered stack on her desk. "Yeah. Yeah, it's been." She stumbles over her words. "It's been around two weeks since Curtis and Will, right?"

Rick's stunned into bewildered, panging silence. The two men hadn't come back from their food and supply run, with only grim-faced Karen and Ryan left to tell their friends. "Yeah," he echoes.

Adjusting the sign so it reads '14 Days without an Accident,' Beth nods again, more determined. "Okay. That number'll never go back to zero. Or, at least, maybe now we'll try harder."

"Indeed," Shanda agrees, and the exchange keeps Rick in better spirits when he wanders out that afternoon, gardening gloves tucked in his belt.

Then what happens is that it rains. It rains a lot. Buckets, cats and dogs, sheets and curtains. It stings Rick's skin where he's caught out from planting the last of their crops; it knocks down the beams of the horse paddock's skeleton. Rick has to recover the tarpaulin resting under the dining pavilion to wrap the beams up in them, or their perfectly sound wood will get rotted through and wasted. Glenn and Ryan run to help him only after he's been out there for what feels like days, though it's probably only five minutes. The downpour lifts as soon as they've taken cover again, coughing and sputtering out like a dying man, another little cosmic joke.

What happens is that spending half an hour out under the storm has Rick sneezing the next morning, coughing the next, and then locked in bed as Dr. S takes his temperature, peers at his throat with a flashlight.

"He's got the flu, alright," he announces to Carl, Hershel, and Daryl, lingering outside Rick's cell. Carl sighs and shifts Judith where she's trying to figure out what's happening, tiny fists closed in her brother's shirt. Hershel looks cowed. Daryl just looks pissed.

"Ain'tcha too old for this shit, man?" he grunts, crossing his arms. His collarbone peers out, a hungry cicada's wing.

Hershel leans on his crutches, perhaps wishing he could assess the damage himself. "What with how he's been running himself ragged over his projects, it's not exactly a surprise."

Rick coughs, liquid enough that it makes everyone wince. "It'll be better if you put Judith's crib in your cell for now, Carl," he says once he's done, shredded and unrecognizable. "I don't want her catching this."

Carl lays his baby sister back in her bed, and Judith giggles when he and Daryl lift it up, swinging it back and forth as they move out. Daryl marches backwards, careful but sure, and his eyes stick on Rick for a moment, then cut back to the task at hand.

Dr. S pats his leg before straightening. "We'll have to go on a run for more paracetamol, but take this one for now." He hands Rick a fat white pill and a bottle of water, along with a packet of more pills. "Every six hours like clockwork, okay?"

"Yeah. Thank you." Rick wishes that his head wouldn't feel so stuffed with cotton and metal shavings, that sweat wasn't breaking out on his skin though he may as well be lying in the Arctic circle. He lies flat on his back to watch the shadows move imperceptibly across the ceiling, hating how he's been rendered useless by the most common of diseases. He doesn't know how he manages to fall asleep.

* * *

Daryl comes for him in the evening, just as Rick blinks awake, his body seeking out food. "Well, you look like shit," he says cheerily, plopping on the floor by Rick's feet with a bowl of heavily watered-down chicken soup and some saltine crackers. Rick accepts both with a pleased sigh, crushing the crackers into the bowl and slurping it at a steady, if slow pace. The steam wakes him up by inches. "How's Carl? Judith?" he asks between spoonfuls.

The specks of silver in Daryl's eyes from the naked lightbulb are visible as they're upturned to the empty wall, trying to look like they're not looking at Rick. "Carl was gonna bring food to ya, with Asskicker, but they could get sick. Offered t' play nurse instead."

Rick coughs out a weak chortle. "This won't actually get infectious until the last few days." He reaches for the tissue paper near his pillow, hacking up phlegm in the most undignified way. Daryl, to his credit, doesn't move an inch. "Viruses work that way," Rick says at last, clearer.

"Oh?" Daryl's head tilts to thunk against the mattress, a smile in his voice. "Gonna take over from Dr. S now?"

"Carl and his kindergarten class would come down with a bug like they shared lungs. I know from experience." Rick's words fade in and out, a broken up radio signal. He coughs again, shuddering, then realizes he's drenched his shirt thanks to the fever. He reaches to pare the hem over his head, a rough curse wrenched out of him when his joints stay clenched and aching.

Daryl intervenes, getting Rick to raise his arms and hook the shirt free, helping him into a new one. A faint, fond curve to his lips while he does it, his hands on Rick's body blessedly cool. Then a shadow crosses his face and Daryl stands straighter, glaring at the space to Rick's right. "Kid's been hangin out with Patrick more."

"That's a good thing," Rick says, and it is. It should be, except Daryl doesn't stopped looking pissed off. And Rick recalls that Patrick was there when David had propositioned Daryl, blatant and damning. Daryl worries that the truth will eke out before they're ready to tell it themselves.

"D' you think—"

Daryl stops like someone pressed mute, hands molding into fists on the floor. "How d' you think he'd take this?" He hesitates to use a more succinct word, waves lamely at himself, then at Rick. "Us?"

Rick wants to sugarcoat what he knows of his son to be true, wants to say that everything will be fine. But Daryl doesn't deserve that. "It could get worse before it gets better," he says, lump in his throat that's from more than his illness. "But it _will_ get better." Carl will always miss and love Lori, just as Rick does, and the first thing the boy will think is that his mother is being replaced. But he can never stay mad at them, especially Daryl.

"He's your family as well as mine," Rick finishes, and at last, Daryl's mouth snags on a less caustic shape.

"It only matters to me what he thinks," Daryl clarifies, subdued. His hand drifts to touch Rick's cheek, imperceptible as a prayer. "Everythin else can go to hell."

Rick's about to hold Daryl's wrist, push a kiss into the palm of Daryl's hand, when footsteps approach. Between one breath and the next, Daryl slouches against the wall, arms crossed, hanging out like a regular buddy would.

"Hey, Dad. Daryl." Carl tugs back Rick's curtain to smile at his father. "We just wanted to say goodnight."

"Goodnight, you two," Rick murmurs, and waves his fingers at Judith, who seems well on her way to falling asleep, drooling on Carl's shoulder. Bent cards of light in their corners of the cell, everyone important to Rick within his radius whenever they need him, and he feels like he can rest easy tonight.

* * *

The cold slows walkers down, is what last winter taught them, and they take full advantage by sending the people who usually patrol the fences out on runs instead. They have more gasoline to power their generators, more food, and a renewed appreciation for their free time.

Rick can count on both hands the instances where he's either heard or stumbled on their neighbors having sex, for peace of mind as much as instant gratification. He can only hope that no one's found him and Daryl that way. It's getting worse daily, a wound becoming infected in minute increments. It's getting worse and Rick hopes it'll never get better, if in exchange it's Daryl's hair between his fingers, Daryl's weight pressing down, Daryl moaning and breaking and stitching together in Rick's grasp.

It's Daryl sleeping curled fetal-like under his poncho, issuing almost inaudible snores. It's Daryl grinning when Carl commiserates over how Beth should've been Carl's age so she could be his girlfriend instead, it's Daryl balancing Judith's feet atop his, doubled over from trying to get her to walk though she can't even utter proper words yet, it's Daryl sketching Glenn and Maggie folding up laundry, getting their smiles just right.

Thinking of Daryl as an infection is rather unromantic, but it's the closest to how Rick feels.

Daryl raises his head deliberately to take Rick's ear between his teeth, and Rick forgets how to breathe. His hips thrust down on reflex, falling short of crushing Daryl to the floor of the empty cell block A. Rick tries in vain to steady himself as Daryl traces the ridge of Rick's ear with his tongue, then nibbles along Rick's newly-shaven jaw, scraping his teeth against the pulse in Rick's throat.

They begin to shift then, their bodies pushing and grinding with aching slowness, unconscious and blind and needy. They move as one, linked and indivisible, falling into a rhythm like the tides. Advance and recede. Question and response. Ebb and flow. Like this thing happening between them is as intrinsic and normal as the current of the sea, like they're being controlled by the moon.

Dangerous thoughts to have, though nothing as volatile and explosive at the harsh oath Daryl gasps into Rick's sternum: "god, _fuck_ me."

Rick stiffens, lust coalescing almost painfully in his stomach, tingling out to the tips of his fingers, the ends of his hair. His tongue gets stuck to the roof of his mouth for wanting, but he withdraws until he's sitting up, their legs staying tangled together. Daryl sits up too, watching Rick fiercely with his lips pressed together, eyes baffled and shining in a way that Rick can sympathize with, knows as well as his own face in the mirror.

Rick stammers, "Am I overreacting or was that—"

"Want you t' fuck me," Daryl says, point blank range, no mistaking it. "Only thing left we haven't done. Wanna try."

Rick's never dared to ask or bring it up, all these months, didn't mind it. But now presented with the concrete possibility of it, jesus christ, he wants to fuck Daryl a _lot._ Except Rick knows that Daryl still has a very skewed, watered-down picture of how sex should be versus how good it should feel. The solution that presents itself is unexpected, something Rick's never thought of before, but is warming up to fast.

"Well. You could. Um. You could do it instead." Whether it's Rick slotted between Daryl's legs or vice versa, neither decision seems so terrible. Rick's pulse zigzags at the mere fantasy of it.

Poorly articulated as it is, Daryl still understands, his expression opening up, wide and awed and flushed. "You want that?" he asks, disbelieving.

It's the question Rick usually aims at Daryl, always wanting to be sure, to give Daryl nothing less than what should be given. Seems that they're in the same boat about this, at least. "Yeah," he confirms, and continues, made brazen by Daryl shifting like he's trying to adjust the pressure in his jeans, "and if you want, we can take turns."

"Yeah," Daryl replies, too fast, hands clenching compulsively on his knees. "Okay." His breathing stutters and his eyes drop to the tent of Rick's erection. Rick's heart jolts unsteadily in his chest, goosebumps rushing over him when Daryl sways forward.

"But not now," Rick has the presence of mind to add, wanting for one overwhelming second to laugh at Daryl's disappointed scowl. "We're not doing anything without. Lube. And condoms." Christ, he's forgotten how mundane yet mortifying the chore of planning sex was.

Daryl's frown deepens. "Condoms? Shit, pretty sure I ain't got anythin. I've never –" His blush worsens, from the self-same embarrassment Rick's undergoing. "Y' know," he ends, feeble.

As if Rick needed to be reminded that he'll be taking Daryl's goddamn virginity. The soft animal of Rick's body would be purring with delight if the idea wasn't so equally terrifying. "It's more for. For the mess," he stutters again.

"Oh." The logistics of it is catching up to Daryl, unspooling like a movie reel behind his eyes, mouth falling open on a useless breath. Rick takes pity on the both of them, hauls Daryl to sit in his lap. Daryl's body molds to the other man's without needing direction, knees to either side of Rick's thighs, shattering pressure of their hips flush together. Daryl crushes their mouths together, greedy and made unapologetic by the magnitude of what they can and will do.

For some reason, when Daryl kisses Rick it makes him think that there's a blizzard outside. It makes him think of lightning and being killed by the forces of nature. The screen of Rick's mind is frantically sketched with a manic tornado-strewn sky, a fatal storm on the horizon, a disaster rushing upon them with catastrophic electric power and the potential to tatter the fabric of reality.

Daryl grabs Rick's wrist to slip one of Rick's fingers into his mouth, breaking a jagged window open in Rick's chest. He opens his mouth to protest but just breathes out quiet and long and low.

Daryl's teeth scrapes along the pad of Rick's finger, then he withdraws, finger coming glistening from that wet mouth. "Show me," he rasps, his words trembling, and Rick can only pull open Daryl's belt, slip between denim and cotton to find his own shaky way inside.

He doesn't know what he's looking for but he finds it anyway. Daryl's body seizes up like it's betrayed him, and he whines, bites Rick's neck as retaliation, arms strangling Rick's torso. But Rick doesn't mind. He's got this crazy idea that if he presses hard enough against Daryl, gets close enough, neither one of them will be able to move or tremble or fuck this up at all, and life will be all downhill from there.

* * *

**once again, sorry for the fuck-all delay. inspiration only struck just when paperwork started piling up, my muse being the phenomenal asshole that they are. please tell me if there are typos, it's one a.m. and my eyes are shriveling up.**

**hopefully this next chappy doesn't take too long. it's smut, what could possibly go wrong *sunglasses emoji***


	24. make a pair of parentheses

Daryl doesn't quite know what he's doing here, but he sure as hell isn't leaving.

Rick is sitting on one of the toilets balancing a small mirror on his lap to peer into it, shaving cream disappearing off his face in slow but steady strokes of the razor he borrowed from Tyreese. He has jeans on but no shirt, bare toes curling up on the scuffed tile when he cuts it too close and a pinprick of blood appears on the angle of his jaw. "God, I haven't done this in a while," he laughs, more to himself than as an actual conversation piece, immersed in relearning the task.

Daryl bites his lip and shifts where he sits on the opposite five-spigot sink, glad that everyone's already down at dinnertime, pale wedge of moon poorly thrown across the both of them. He's definitely not going anywhere.

It had been a bizarrely brief conversation that transpired between them two days before, in the middle of fence duty along the west wing, Rick asking Daryl's opinion on whether he should shave or not. Daryl was too surprised to think about it, said that it was all up to Rick, which it was.

"But what do _you_ prefer?" Rick insisted, as earnest as the clouds above them, and it hit Daryl that Rick wanted to follow Daryl's opinion. That Daryl's opinion on something as mundane as shaving (and other less mundane things) matter to Rick.

And Daryl couldn't help but look back on the young, fresh-faced deputy of a year ago, who didn't have to wage war on himself in order to give up a smile, so here they now are.

Already Daryl's true wish is manifesting: the tension has leached out of Rick, perfectly at home splashing water onto himself in the effort to clean his razor in the basin beside him before continuing his shave. He'll miss the scratch of that salt and pepper beard against his thighs, but Daryl won't deny that seeing Rick's skin being bared by inches presents a further level of intimacy.

"Y' look like you'd get carded by bouncers at clubs," Daryl jests, flicking out the hand towel Carol had requested he drop by for Rick, the real reason why he's here in the first place.

Rick snorts, and stands to take the towel, wiping away the last of the foam. He looks decades younger, the plush of his mouth more defined and his cheeks smooth and tempting to the touch. Only by the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes could you see the passage of time. "And you wouldn't?" Rick shoots back.

"At least I look my age, old man."

Daryl grimaces after saying it, bad joke done in bad taste. But Rick is grinning, only feigning his affronted air. "'Old man'? We're going down that road now?" He stalks up to Daryl until he's standing between Daryl's thighs, hands on the porcelain to either side of Daryl, but they're not touching anywhere, not yet.

Rick smells chemically clean, and _warm_, his curls still damp from the hot water he washed with before shaving, and there are still trickles of it down his chest. Daryl fidgets from trying to hide how turned on he's gotten just from watching Rick shave, and Rick's nostrils flare, pleased and predatory. Daryl swallows, glad that they're obscured by the makeshift curtains around them; they'll have fair warning if anyone happens to come in. "Sorry, couldn't resist," he says.

"Really." And Rick doesn't sound like he's talking about the wisecrack anymore, eyes like a seismic event when they meet Daryl's, dragging continents away from each other and pushing up mountains. Rick slides his hands over Daryl's ass to half-lift, half-coax him onto the sink.

Daryl clutches Rick's shoulders to steady both his balance and his jackrabbit pulse, and touches the bared skin of Rick's cheeks. Rick smiles, and Daryl wonders at the feel of it happening right beneath his palms like he caused it, like sorcery, sheer magic.

Their kiss is purposeful, more exploratory than usual, Daryl's teeth ghosting across Rick's lower lip. Then Rick squeezes Daryl's ass, almost at the same time he drives his hips forward, and Daryl short-circuits, a lightning storm overtaking his senses until they're moving like they're fucking, and Daryl needs them to be fucking for _real_.

He knows rudimentary knowledge of it enough to know what he's asking for. It's only ever made him apprehensive before, but now he wants to carry Rick home in his teeth, to slam open every door Rick's ever shut, burn the place down.

"Rick," he manages to gasp, his own voice alien to his ears, and something of his desperation must bleed through, since Rick stills, lays one last bite on Daryl's heaving mouth.

"Later," Rick promises, sounding just as wrecked himself, and chortles with his nose pressed to Daryl's cheek, "Still think I'm an old man?"

"Geroff me, hot stuff," Daryl huffs, all bravura and smirks, but he's by no means steady on his feet when he leaves.

* * *

_it's going to happen_.

The gray sun is high in the sky and Daryl only has a thin fall coat, his uncle's vest, but he can hardly feel the cold. He knocks off the light snow that's piled up on the tarpaulin covering his father's bike and settles against it, waits for the others set to join the supply run. He's only on because like hell is he asking anybody to do me a favor and get me some condoms, willya. Because jesus, it's going to happen.

Rick wants him, in every way a person can define the word, and Daryl feels the same. Nothing else should matter, but theory is always vastly different from practice.

He fishes a rumpled cigarette from the depths of his pockets to calm his nerves, about to close his eyes and relax into it when he sees Carl emerge around the corner with a comic book in his hand, Hellboy, by the looks of it. "Hey, Daryl. Are you going with?"

"Yeah," Daryl confirms, smoke escaping his mouth.

"Can you bring any more of these, if you find 'em?" Carl hangs his head, perhaps sheepish about making such a childish request. "Michonne's the one who usually does that stuff, but. Can you?"

"Sure. But they might be too violent for ya. Rot yer brain."

Carl frowns until he spots the tremor of amusement to Daryl's mouth, and he laughs at the irony. His voice broke some weeks ago and the newness shows, still coltish in pronouncing words. He's shot up some inches, too, no effort needed to sit himself on the tailgate of the chopper where he once had to hop up. The boy's grown so much, but the petulant furrow between his brows is a tell Daryl will always know. "What's botherin you?" he asks, not unkindly.

Carl's eyes quaver, and he tightens his grip on his comics. "Mom loved Hellboy." There's a dull silence that lasts a few seconds, and Daryl's chest is lit with sorrow, and an irrational fear. "Shanda said that since my dad shaved, girls are all but lining up. And David said something like that too." Carl shrugs. "It's weird."

Daryl has stingers in his eyes and a thickness blocking off his throat, but he waits for Carl to elaborate. "Judith's around six months old now, I guess. And that's how long Mom's been." He cuts himself off, blinking back tears. "I don't want Dad to forget her."

This is wrong, so wrong that Daryl takes a hit that feels like static electricity in his lungs. Then Carl continues, "You're the only one I know that's lost your mom like this too," and Daryl realizes the kid is _asking him for advice_ on what to do. What a fucked up way to be.

He doesn't look Carl dead in the eye, is the only way he finds to fortitude to say what he tells himself every day when it comes to his own family. "Your dad bein happy don't mean he's forgot your ma. Hell, you still laugh and read comics and still think of her, don't ya? If Rick finds someone and he's happy, it's no different." Daryl clears the grit from the names of the dead well enough to say, "Lori wouldn't want her boys staying sad."

"I never. I didn't think of it that way." Carl tries to smile, and fails, staring down at the battered comic book in his hands. "But it's still hard."

Daryl sighs, and gently nudges the younger boy and waits until their eyes meet, reminding him, "Nothin good in this world was ever got the easy way."

Carl nods, reassured, and Daryl gives in to a silent prayer: _let him forgive me after he knows_.

* * *

"It's pretty cold tonight. Not that that'll be a problem for long."

Daryl's startled from his thoughts, even when Rick's voice is merely an amused whisper. They're in cell block A again, graduated from the cement floor to the freshly-dusted bed. Rick is sitting on the edge of the mattress, his jacked pinned between his arms, bending to pull off his boots. There's a scattering of moonlight dousing the room, drifting on the walls and picking out Rick's smooth face, his nervous, eager smile.

This is everything Daryl never deserved, and what he'd started taking for granted until Carl made him remember that he could lose more than he bargained for if he fucks up.

"Are you okay?" Rick stands to rescue Daryl from where he's hovering in the middle of the cell, until they're sitting facing each other, knees bumping and hands pressed together. Concern, and fear, for some reason, etched in Rick's eyes like hieroglyphics.

Daryl's throat has gone suddenly, starkly dry. "You sure 'bout this?"

"I should be the one asking you that," Rick chuckles after a surprised pause, but Daryl needs to know, needs to hear it said.

"I'm sure." Daryl's certainty of Rick is a clear white field in his heart, but he can't speak for Rick. He stoops his head, stares very hard at the frayed patch on Rick's jacket. "Are you?"

Without hesitation, Rick leans forward, kisses Daryl's forehead like a spring thaw, like first light of a new day. "I'm sure of you, Daryl. Always."

It sounds like a promise, an outright wedding vow, and Daryl's too stunned to do anything but laugh, feeling bizarre tears fog the corners of his eyes. Rick clasps Daryl's hands tighter, and kisses down the side of Daryl's face until they're both gasping, mouths meeting in easy conversation. Wrapped around each other, jagged bolts of emotion tearing through them, the two of them throwing off sparks into the dark room.

And then Rick withdraws just enough to observe Daryl's flushed face and kiss-stung lips, the same tectonic shift in his demeanor from days ago. "Now c'mere." It doesn't sound like a demand at all, though it's phrased like one, and Daryl shivers. No holding back now.

Losing clothes is a matter of complicated acrobatics when the people involved don't want to separate for even a second, Rick's hands restless on Daryl's shoulders stomach hips ass, Daryl returning the favor. The heat of the moment ebbs a little when Daryl elbows Rick by accident, and Rick's pants get stuck halfway down his legs, silly moments in transit that get Daryl laughing.

Rick is flat on his back, wearing a grin and nothing else, skin as smooth as marble, glowing pale as a fingerprint. "If you still have half a mind to find things funny, I don't think I'm doing a good enough job."

Daryl kneels on the mattress, hovering over Rick with his fingers caught in the wire mesh of the top bunk above him. "Gonna do somethin about it?" he taunts, just running his mouth, but it works, since Rick's smile morphs into a smirk, and he catches Daryl's waist in order to bite Daryl's stomach.

Nearly banging his head on the bunk above, Daryl has to fight to stay vertical. Rick nibbles his careful way along, circumnavigating Daryl's belly button twice before dipping his tongue in, then scraping his teeth against the tender flesh just below. There are crashing streaks of light exploding behind Daryl's eyelids, glittering comets falling to earth. He almost doesn't hear Rick's throaty order to 'move up here' until he's tugged forward by his ass and Rick swallows him down.

That almost breaks Daryl, but he's able to pass his hand over Rick's face, push Rick's curls out of his eyes and tug so Rick moans like he's the one getting sucked. Daryl wants nothing more than to fuck Rick's mouth with complete abandon, knows Rick would let him (has already let him, put him on edge until they were both sweat-slick and daryl was shaking from it and rick's voice was wrecked afterwards), but that's not why they're here now.

"Stuff's in my jacket," Daryl remembers to say, and Rick slows, withdraws with a soft pop that makes Daryl's toes curl. Rick fumbles for Daryl's jacket where it landed by his head, comes up with a packet of lube and three condoms with their wrapping crinkled and worn at the corners.

Daryl's face heats and he resists the urge to cover his eyes or something just as juvenile. He hadn't quite been thinking when he grabbed what was available, irritated that he didn't recognize the brands, giddy and kinda freaked out, though that's only his default setting at this point, a mild overlay of freaked out like frost on the ground outside. He's fine. He's going to be fine.

He has to be, for Rick.

"If at any point you need to stop, tell me to stop."

Daryl looks down and Rick is staring at him like he'll disappear if he blinks even once, and Daryl has to focus on breathing. He lowers himself onto Rick until there's nowhere they're not touching, rolls his hips until Rick's breath is a hurricane in his ear and all the cold is gone.

"Shoulda guessed by now," Daryl rasps, punctuates his words with a deep kiss so Rick remembers, "I ain't ever gonna want you t' stop."

Rick kisses back softly, softly, and his hand leaves Daryl's back for a moment, comes back wet. The breach doesn't sting as much as it did when they had nothing but spit, the slide easier. Suspiciously so, and Rick's brows furrow as he asks, "Did you—"

"Tried it by myself, earlier," Daryl stammers, squirming, recalling how he had to hold his breath whenever people passed his bunk on the way to dinner as he tried to get his fingers in as fast as possible, impatience and curiosity nearly the death of him. His embarrassment melts away when Rick's cock jumps against his stomach. He bites Rick's earlobe, confesses with a strange new delight, "Couldn't reach the goods the way you did, but I still got off."

Rick groans, almost panicked from how turned on he is, and Daryl grins, drunk on the savagery, "Don't worry, next time I'll let ya watch."

With an honest-to-god growl, Rick shoves another finger inside so hard Daryl cries out. The urgency returns and things blur together until Daryl becomes aware of Rick teasing in his pinky finger alongside the three already fucking him, of how hard he is but how he knows can't come, not like this.

"C'mon, Rick, please," he whimpers, and clarity returns to Rick's eyes. He nods jerkily, kisses Daryl as he wrestles the condom on. Rick manages to flip them over so Daryl is on his back and Rick is kneeling between his legs, a fist moving around his cock, his eyes closed like he can't help it, and Daryl's chest hurts for wanting him.

After that, Daryl's perception of things begin to fracture, images coming to him like reflections of a shattered mirror, littered on a concrete sidewalk.

Rick's hand on Daryl's shoulder, his thumb against the pulse in Daryl's neck. Spanning his hands on Rick's chest, feeling the sure weight of him, blistered by the feel of him so deep inside. Rick laughing, breathless and happy, his lips on Daryl's in a kiss he keeps forgetting to take. Daryl's shoulders arcing off the bed, keening sounds coming from a place inside him he didn't know existed. The feel of Rick's palms as they slide under his thighs, bearing down. The way Rick gasps his name, voice cracking. The aching slowness, the flawless rhythm, Rick's fingers knotted in his tattered hair. Grabbing Rick, frenzied, kissing him wildly, feeling like he'll die if he doesn't get closer to Rick, like he'll die if he does. The taste of Rick, the taste of himself in Rick's mouth, the sweat trembling on both their bodies. Shards of light patterning the bed, his hand as it runs down the knobby path of Rick's spine. A single thought slamming into Daryl's mind, knocking him senseless, then circling, chanting over and over again— this is everything i never knew i wanted.

* * *

The following two days are uncanny, in that nothing seems to have changed.

Daryl's body is raw and untrustworthy, sore in places he didn't expect: his abdomen, his trapezius muscles, his thighs. But no one looks him up and down like he has 'just been devirginized' all over him in Sharpie, though he feels that way. The world keeps spinning. Rick is the one who gets some unwanted attention, for the bite mark Daryl had left too high on his shoulder right at the end of it, not thinking with his cock spilling in his hand and Rick moving faster to follow him—

Refilling gun cartridges with Carol is not a good time to be remembering these things. He feigns a cough to escape the stockroom soon after, and runs smack-dab into Maggie, who gives him a sly grin he doesn't want to interpret at the moment. "You okay there?" she asks.

"Peachy," Daryl grunts, just as Glenn emerges from around the corner, bits of snow still flurrying his hair, wind-chafed cheeks.

"Hey, Michonne just got back and. Um." He actually stops in his tracks before plastering on a bizarre, formal air. "Daryl."

Maggie waggles an eyebrow at her husband while glancing Daryl's way, and Daryl huffs, knocks into Maggie's shoulder as he leaves. "Quit bein weird," he begs them both, while uncomfortable suspicion boils in his gut.

He'd talk to Rick about it, but the man's being strange too, awkward and hesitant and limiting their conversations to single words and sentences. Daryl's not hurt so much as lost, confused himself. What the etiquette is after a night of debauchery to the extreme is, he doesn't know. He wishes with all his heart he could talk to Michonne or Beth, but he's no better than the weather, frozen in place with only memories for his kindling.

And then Rick approaches his cell at dinnertime, Judith bundled in his arms, and says as though telling the time, "Are we still taking turns?"

Daryl gapes at him, stuck brushing his teeth, knowing what Rick means but not quite believing it. He nods through the foam, and Rick nods back, bright and maddeningly enigmatic. "See you later, then."

_later_ always means near midnight, they've agreed upon at this point, which gives Daryl plenty of time to overanalyze the situation. Was Rick okay and happy with this, or was he so disappointed by what happened that he hopes the reverse will rectify things, Daryl won't know until four hours later. He manages to sleep for two hours, wear a hole in the floor from pacing the next, then mutter 'hell with it' and proceed to block A to wait for Rick there. The stars, hard and crystalline through the scraps of clouds, blink at Daryl without judgment.

He sits at the same bunk, still a little messy from the events of two days ago, rubbing his hands together to get the feeling back in them. Then Daryl thinks, quite clearly, 'prepping to fuck rick grimes in the ass,' and a startled laugh explodes from him without warning, his own mind catching him off-guard. He tries to clamp down the outburst, embarrassed by its suddenness and disconcerting volume in the empty cell block, but it's no use.

Rick comes in not long after, when Daryl's still trying to smother his unruly giggles, and he's amused rather than concerned for Daryl's sanity, at least. "Hey there. Care to let me in on the joke?"

Daryl stares at the peeling plaster on the walls, grinning with black mirth. "Me. I'm the joke. Last time was so bad we gotta do it again, right?"

Rick's mouth works like a dying fish, and his fingers open and close at his sides, stricken dumb for a few seconds. "What. What? Is that how you feel?" When Daryl doesn't reply, he rushes to say, "What we did was perfect, Daryl, so perfect I was scared I wouldn't live up to it."

That was unexpected. Daryl catches a skewed sideways glimpse of Rick's eyes, glinting like blue crystal, fear and humiliation and uncertainty warring there. It's jarring; Daryl's once again forgotten to put himself in Rick's shoes.

"That's why I've been less than chatty, recently. Doing my own research on. Things." Rick utters a helpless laugh, blushing. "I just want to give to you what you've given me."

Daryl gawks, still processing. It's starting to sound a lot like Rick's been avoiding him to try and practice fingering himself, just as Daryl had, and it's so bizarre and so goddamn _hot_ he's torn between cackling and pinning Rick right this instant.

Instead, he says, reassuring Rick, "This ain't a competition, man. Don't gotta do it 'cause you think y' owe me one." He holds his hand out and waits for Rick to take it before adding, with a slow grin he lets spread across his face, "But I _do_ wanna make you feel good."

Rick visibly swallows, much to Daryl's glee. "Same here," he adds, quiet and truthful, and brings Daryl's hand up to his lips, laying a chaste kiss on the knuckles, a not-so-chaste one on the inside of Daryl's wrist. But it's not just lust that drives Daryl to grab Rick's roughly shadowed face and kiss him, it's always been more than that. Daryl can only now admit this to himself, undressing Rick with reverence, as Rick does the same for him.

Daryl holds Rick to the bed by the hips, brilliantly aware that Rick's letting him do this, _wants_ him to do this. He strokes the ridges there, kisses up Rick's chest, tugs on a nipple with his teeth with a hand inside Rick's boxers. Rick gasps and writhes for a few long minutes, then turns around in Daryl's hold, pulling one of Daryl's hands around to his stomach and tilting a bit, their bodies sliding together.

It takes them a few tries to get it right, but they get it right all the same, Rick's face wrenched in the mattress and Daryl's mouth moving damply across the nape of Rick's neck. 'so this is what rick feels like,' Daryl thinks, simple and amazed, rocking forwards each time Rick pushes back against him. He doesn't realize Rick's crying until he brushes Rick's curls away from his face and sees the tears running sideways out his eyes, hitting the sheets.

"jesus christ, does it hurt," Daryl asks, horrified. He tries to pull away but Rick shakes his head, his mouth moving without sound as he blindly reaches backwards to clutch Daryl's side.

"I'm okay, Daryl," he says, short of breath, and he is. He's hard and hot in Daryl's hand when he checks, and so they start again, slower, Daryl's fist on Rick's cock, Rick's hand on Daryl's fist. The tears don't stop, though, and Daryl licks at Rick's wet face, the tender skin under Rick's eyes, the fragile shield of his eyelids.

They end up falling asleep there and waking with the sunrise, the pale watery light washing in through the window, coloring the shadows like ash, making Daryl and Rick indistinguishable, tangled together. Daryl regains consciousness from Rick tracing the bridge of his nose, the edges of his lips, and giving him a simple kiss. Rick smiles with his eyes and the world makes perfect sense.

"We should tell Carl," he whispers, sleep-thick but sure, like he's been watching Daryl and thinking about this, and Daryl says, "Okay."

It's effortless and terrifying and wonderful.

It makes him wonder how long this can possibly last.

* * *

**i'm sorry for the hella long delay, guys, if you're still even reading this thing. real life has been a rollercoaster i just wanna get off of, at this point. bear with me if you still wanna. because no matter how long it takes me, i'd promised myself i'd finish this or die trying. ha.**

**also: ba dum tsss they had the sex.**


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